This reminds me of an incident I experienced in college. A friend was talking about the Orion Scott Card book Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. That book presents an alternate timeline where Columbus never went to the Americas, so the natives grew I disturbed and eventually invaded Europe. The person he was talking to was visibly agitated at the suggestion, even in fiction, of Native Americans being anything other than victims. He kept interrupting my friend to say “but that’s wrong! Europe invaded America!” My friend kept trying to explain that this book was positing a fictional alternate timeline but the other guy simply wouldn’t acknowledge that.
It’s terrifying how many people can’t even allow the idea of a a worldview different from theirs to even exist.
I know what you’re getting at. That thing about low intelligence people being unable to understand hypotheticals. However the person my friend was talking to was a writer. Granted, he was a gay writer, in that he was gay and wrote only gay stories about gay people doing gay things. Still, you’d think a writer can wrap his head around the concept of an imagined scenario. I think it was more that he just couldn’t tolerate presenting Native Americans as anything other than peace loving treehuggers who were beaten down by the white man.
I guess it's something Disparu mentions repeatedly in the last couple of months. The 'writer' most certainly cannot imagine things that don't align with his 'lived experience', so everything has to bend to his worldview. He probably couldn't write a normal sex-scene right after watching porn of it.
His lived experience is that native americans are poor victims (actual reality might disagree with that but it's what has been hammered into his brain for ages), so there is no way they cannot be victims.
This reminds me of an incident I experienced in college. A friend was talking about the Orion Scott Card book Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. That book presents an alternate timeline where Columbus never went to the Americas, so the natives grew I disturbed and eventually invaded Europe. The person he was talking to was visibly agitated at the suggestion, even in fiction, of Native Americans being anything other than victims. He kept interrupting my friend to say “but that’s wrong! Europe invaded America!” My friend kept trying to explain that this book was positing a fictional alternate timeline but the other guy simply wouldn’t acknowledge that. It’s terrifying how many people can’t even allow the idea of a a worldview different from theirs to even exist.
I know what you’re getting at. That thing about low intelligence people being unable to understand hypotheticals. However the person my friend was talking to was a writer. Granted, he was a gay writer, in that he was gay and wrote only gay stories about gay people doing gay things. Still, you’d think a writer can wrap his head around the concept of an imagined scenario. I think it was more that he just couldn’t tolerate presenting Native Americans as anything other than peace loving treehuggers who were beaten down by the white man.
I guess it's something Disparu mentions repeatedly in the last couple of months. The 'writer' most certainly cannot imagine things that don't align with his 'lived experience', so everything has to bend to his worldview. He probably couldn't write a normal sex-scene right after watching porn of it.
His lived experience is that native americans are poor victims (actual reality might disagree with that but it's what has been hammered into his brain for ages), so there is no way they cannot be victims.