What speaks to you?

On my second reading of At the Sound of Triumph and on page 633 found... "She'd read what she wanted to see into Elahnah's letters"

I think this sums up a point I want to discuss with this topic...

Why it speaks to us may be as important as what speaks to us

I am talking about something a bit different. What I am referring to is diversity in the cultural matrix here on earth compared with the commonality of the cultural matrix on Safehold. This later is what enabled the COGA to rule an entire world for a thousand years.

Cultural diversity has also been the limiting factor on attempts by the Nazis to expand their reach. Communism has never been adopted freely by a heavily industrial nation. The point is that whenever someone seeks to impose an outside solution in places where it doesn't fit, resistance to that solution eventually defeats it. One can reference this to the failure of colonialism.

Or, something we Americans should be able to relate to is our repeated failure to impose "freedom and democracy" in areas of the world to which it is not native.

None of this is absolute, of course. Think India, Japan and China where outside solutions eventually did prevail and were "owned" by the populace and become native. Or think of Russia where it eventually collapsed.

The real point I'm making here is how complex and diversified the current Terran cultual and social situation is compared to the simplicity of the Safehold story.

Don

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You bring several good points to the discussion and I think I'll let some of them simmer a bit before I try to respond... Need to do some research too but I do want to touch on the last point for a moment.
Of course the issues are simplified in this story, I have stated previously that these are allegorical in nature, parables if you will and these tools are always deliberately simplified examples of the real world told in story format to help more people to understand what the author is trying to illustrate.

Of course, I may be the most presumptuous bastard you will ever encounter to think that I KNOW what David Weber has in mind and just because I see strong parallel between Clynthan and Detwiller as examples of power hungry smartest man in the room who would rather kill themselves than face justice, that doesn't say that David was making oblique referenced to people that might be on the headlines of our newspaper tomorrow.
On the other hand, if we think that someone in our government (or in the shadows behind it) is looking too much like he is running roughshod over the constitution to fill his own pockets. Maybe we should demand actions to stop them.

n7axw wrote:I am talking about something a bit different. What I am referring to is diversity in the cultural matrix here on earth compared with the commonality of the cultural matrix on Safehold. This later is what enabled the COGA to rule an entire world for a thousand years.

Cultural diversity has also been the limiting factor on attempts by the Nazis to expand their reach. Communism has never been adopted freely by a heavily industrial nation. The point is that whenever someone seeks to impose an outside solution in places where it doesn't fit, resistance to that solution eventually defeats it. One can reference this to the failure of colonialism.

Or, something we Americans should be able to relate to is our repeated failure to impose "freedom and democracy" in areas of the world to which it is not native.

None of this is absolute, of course. Think India, Japan and China where outside solutions eventually did prevail and were "owned" by the populace and become native. Or think of Russia where it eventually collapsed.

The real point I'm making here is how complex and diversified the current Terran cultual and social situation is compared to the simplicity of the Safehold story.

Don

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C. O. Thompson wrote:Previously, I had posted that my mother tried to teach me not to argue politics or religion... where is the fun in avoiding these topics?

I fear that's a somewhat novel definition of "fun".

While I understand that both require a kind of faith to build your convictions on, and ... "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"(Heb.11:1)

Programming message bases have the concept of Religious Argument(tm), and a gentleperson's agreement that some topics are fruitless to bring up. (Whether Vi or Emacs is the One True Editor on Unix systems is a canonical example.)

The point is that the underlying beliefs live on an emotional level, like religion or politics, and emotional beliefs aren't amenable to rational argument.

I tend to stay out of them as wastes of time. Nothing I say will change the mind of someone on the opposite side of the fence from me, and I have better things to do than try.

What I may do is not so much argue against a stated belief as question why it is held. What makes that position attractive to the holder? Why do they want to believe it?

One the current national political level, I watched the profound shock and horror among Clinton supporters as Trump won with grim amusement. I saw similar shock and horror among that segment of the electorate when George W. Bush won election for the first time.

My own take is that electoral demographics have profoundly changed in ways that neither party have properly grasped, and each is operating under an obsolete worldview.

Rather than focus on the merits or lack of same of the candidates, I think it would be more useful to look at the electorate that voted for them. What do they believe? What do they want? Why did they think the candidate they voted for was the best choice in consequence.?

(And on that line, a current book here is The Myth of the Rational Voter. The premise is that the issues we see aren't due to corruption, cronyism, pernicious corporate lobbyists or the like: they stem from the fact that elected officials try to give their constituents what they think they want, when what they actually need is a very different matter. In those terms, a leader is a politician who will try to give his constituents what they need, and get them to agree with what he is trying to do. He's willing to accept the risk of being turned out of office next election if he can't gain their support because the goal is more important than his continued tenure. We've had very few leaders on either side throughout our history.)
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Dennis

C. O. Thompson wrote:You don't think that Hitler's Germany or the Red Russia or thew American or French Revolutions for that matter started from decisions of small groups of people... or that the gridlock in DC or funding of the men and women who executed that gridlock comes from the small group (compared to the population) of people???

Someone has an idea and gets others to endorse it as Clanthyn did with the group of four to buy onto his "Final Solution".

I do indeed think that small groups of people are the drivers in such things.

But Safehold is simpler, in starting from a far more uniform culture with a common language, shared beliefs, and common ways of interacting.

The world we live in has none of those things overall, and the underlying motivations and the way things are worked out are far more complex in consequence.

For some background on how I think about this stuff, see the works of the late Edward T. Hall. Hall was an anthropologist attached to the University of New Mexico. He and his research partner linguist Norman Trager were doing studies in comparative culture, and Hall discovered he would have to devise a comprehensive theory of culture to define just what they were studying and provide ways that they could be compared. The results of his efforts are documented in his books The Silent Language, The Hidden Dimension and Beyond Culture. Many things fell into place when I read Hall, and I'm astonished his work isn't more widely known among genre writers. (The only one I know who consciously drew from Hall was the late Janet Kagan, in her SF novel Hellspark, and I know because I asked her and she said yes, she drew upon Hall for the book.)
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Dennis

Peter2 wrote:One of the reasons that I have so little time for both national politicians and the press is that both classes are expert in telling the truth in a manner calculated to deceive, and that they make ruthless use of that skill to mislead others. OK, no generalisation is completely true, but I find the world makes more sense if I take what they say with rather more than one grain of salt. The main objectives of a national politician are first to retain his/her position and second to gain power, and any good he/she does is secondary. And the main objective of a pressman (of either sex) is to sell papers – or to keep you watching, or listening.

News, by its very nature, gives a biased view of the world, simply because it is out of the ordinary.

That's my view, anyway. Feel free to disagree!
.

I mostly agree.

One thing I've been at pains to point out elsewhere is that politicians are elected officials, and their first and over riding goal is to get reelected.

When a new bill lands on a politician's desk, a politician will have one of three reactions:

My constituents will like it. It will get me votes! I'm in favor!

My constituents won't like it. It will cost me votes! I'm opposed!

My constituents won't care one way or the other, so I'm willing to do a deal. My support on this for you, in exchange for your support for me on this thing my constituents will care about!

The last is where the real work gets done, and the source of cynical comments like "He's an honest politician. He stays bought." come from. To successfully make deals, you must be trusted to keep your end. If you don't, you'll find it progressively harder to make them.

Politicians need to keep constituents happy to stay in office, and do what they think is required to do that.

(And on a side note, I yawn in discussions about the evils of lobbyists. What lobbyists provide is money. What politicians need is votes. The money funds ad blitzes come election time, but the votes are what is critical. The fact that a lobbying organization has contributed to a politician's campaign gives them a conduit to express their views about what they want. Whether they get it will depend on how the politician thinks his voters will feel about it. If he thinks they won't like it, it won't happen, no matter how much money was contributed.)

And all news is inherently biased. It's written by human beings with opinions, so it can't be any other way. We hope that the news we get at least has the facts straight, but how those facts are interpreted and what they mean will varying depending upon the reporting source. To many folks gravitate to news sources that support what they already believe. For them, the news they read isn't biased. It's what they want to believe, and is therefore the sworn on Gospel. Getting out of the comfort zone and looking at other news sources with a different take seldom occurs.

The trick is understanding the inherent bias in the source, and being able to make adjustments to account for it.
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Dennis

Ever since Mykel Staynair discussed his appreciation of Langhorne's traumatized choices a couple of books ago, I have been considering the impact on society as a whole of a population of PTSD victims. The entire Terran Federation population had quirks relating to their knowledge of certain death. We saw how it manifested in the decisions of the command crew. Let's face it all of them would have had to deal with survivor's guilt on a grand scale as well as a lifetime's neurosis relating to their impending doom from the Gbaba.

What speaks to me is that I can't fault Bedard for suppressing the Colonists memories. I fault her for doing so without consent, but not for making sure Safehold did not bring with it the Terran Federation's neurotic foibles. I have major issues with all the other .....foibles... she introduced, but not for suppressing the memories. In a real sense she gave the colonists a new beginning that was so important for humanity's last, best hope.

PeterZ wrote:Ever since Mykel Staynair discussed his appreciation of Langhorne's traumatized choices a couple of books ago, I have been considering the impact on society as a whole of a population of PTSD victims. The entire Terran Federation population had quirks relating to their knowledge of certain death. We saw how it manifested in the decisions of the command crew. Let's face it all of them would have had to deal with survivor's guilt on a grand scale as well as a lifetime's neurosis relating to their impending doom from the Gbaba.

What speaks to me is that I can't fault Bedard for suppressing the Colonists memories. I fault her for doing to without consent, but not for making sure Safehold did not bring with it the Terran Federation's neurotic foibles. I have major issues with all the other .....foibles... she introduced, but not for suppressing the memories.

Actually the colonists had agreed to have knowledge of technology suppresses, but not to have a religion installed. That was Bedard's "crime"

fallsfromtrees wrote:

PeterZ wrote:Ever since Mykel Staynair discussed his appreciation of Langhorne's traumatized choices a couple of books ago, I have been considering the impact on society as a whole of a population of PTSD victims. The entire Terran Federation population had quirks relating to their knowledge of certain death. We saw how it manifested in the decisions of the command crew. Let's face it all of them would have had to deal with survivor's guilt on a grand scale as well as a lifetime's neurosis relating to their impending doom from the Gbaba.

What speaks to me is that I can't fault Bedard for suppressing the Colonists memories. I fault her for doing to without consent, but not for making sure Safehold did not bring with it the Terran Federation's neurotic foibles. I have major issues with all the other .....foibles... she introduced, but not for suppressing the memories.

Actually the colonists had agreed to have knowledge of technology suppresses, but not to have a religion installed. That was Bedard's "crime"

Suppressing memories of technology does not mean suppressing all memories. As was discuss between Nimue and Merlin, suppressed memories have to be overlaid with something or the psyche will chew away at the "blank" space in the memory until something jarred loose.

Bedard provided a comprehensive alternative to the Terran Federation memories of trauma and pain. The original Operation Ark plan did not envision going that far, and so would have retained some memories of the TF. Those retained memories would have held the residue of trauma and pain. How that residue would have shaped the direction of Safehold's development is unknown, but would have been significant.

DMcCunney wrote:

C. O. Thompson wrote:Previously, I had posted that my mother tried to teach me not to argue politics or religion... where is the fun in avoiding these topics?

I fear that's a somewhat novel definition of "fun".

While I understand that both require a kind of faith to build your convictions on, and ... "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"(Heb.11:1)

Programming message bases have the concept of Religious Argument(tm), and a gentleperson's agreement that some topics are fruitless to bring up. (Whether Vi or Emacs is the One True Editor on Unix systems is a canonical example.)

The point is that the underlying beliefs live on an emotional level, like religion or politics, and emotional beliefs aren't amenable to rational argument.

I tend to stay out of them as wastes of time. Nothing I say will change the mind of someone on the opposite side of the fence from me, and I have better things to do than try.

What I may do is not so much argue against a stated belief as question why it is held. What makes that position attractive to the holder? Why do they want to believe it?

One the current national political level, I watched the profound shock and horror among Clinton supporters as Trump won with grim amusement. I saw similar shock and horror among that segment of the electorate when George W. Bush won election for the first time.

My own take is that electoral demographics have profoundly changed in ways that neither party have properly grasped, and each is operating under an obsolete worldview.

Rather than focus on the merits or lack of same of the candidates, I think it would be more useful to look at the electorate that voted for them. What do they believe? What do they want? Why did they think the candidate they voted for was the best choice in consequence.?

(And on that line, a current book here is The Myth of the Rational Voter. The premise is that the issues we see aren't due to corruption, cronyism, pernicious corporate lobbyists or the like: they stem from the fact that elected officials try to give their constituents what they think they want, when what they actually need is a very different matter. In those terms, a leader is a politician who will try to give his constituents what they need, and get them to agree with what he is trying to do. He's willing to accept the risk of being turned out of office next election if he can't gain their support because the goal is more important than his continued tenure. We've had very few leaders on either side throughout our history.)
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Dennis

Excellent points, Dennis. I, as a retired pastor, can enjoy discussing religion and theology, but my vocation tends to intimidate some. So any more I tend to avoid it.

As for politics, my own blood tends to boil when I get caught up in it. So, not wishing to spend the remainder of my time upset and angry, I just stay away from it.

Don

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