Well I think every civilization needs a good concept for enough people to buy into it. But I'm a bit too lazy to provide coherent examples at the moment.
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Well I think every civilization needs a good concept for enough people to buy into it. But I'm a bit too lazy to provide coherent examples at the moment.
Louanne Learning
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like utilitarianism?
Any concept that seems like a shining beacon to either rational or irrational minds. What appeals in the moment could also be the very thing which causes the unraveling.
Yeah, I'd go more with terrifying or at least worrisome.
Nothing is sacred in the land of fiction.
I find these days that the word "interesting" is often used in a passive aggresive way. True "interest" is feigned. There's no real interest in your position. The interest is in undermining your "flawed" argument. We could call it a logical falacy, the "interesting argument."
Hmm. Tbh, apocalyptic stuff has featured in various WIPs across the years. I'd say it's an interest. I find the reasoning behind the perception of passive aggressive to be not accurate. But, playing devil's advocate here, understandable since the interwebs lends itself to those kinds of interpretations/motivations.
***Warning: longish and serious post, but worth reading - I hope***
The first "serious" short I wrote featured Geryon, and I have read Inferno, first for pleasure and then in astonishment.
We don't exactly know when Dante wrote Inferno, but our best guess between approximately 1308 and 1314 (so roughly 40 years before the Black Death hit Europe). I suppose that if you look at it from a 14th-century perspective (i.e. really, really cock-eyed), lying -- and specifically, deceit and hypocrisy -- is a worse sin than murder.
To explain, it is necessary to be aware of medieval Italian history. To be very brief (and quote Gemini): "The Italian city-states frequently warred against each other, primarily from the 12th to the 15th centuries, characterized by power struggles between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and later between regional powers like Venice, Milan, and Florence. Major conflicts continued into the 16th century (1494–1559) as part of the Italian Wars, which involved foreign powers."
So, Dante's The Divine Comedy was written exactly during the period when the city-state wars were in full swing. (Not coincidentally, Machiavelli wrote The Prince when foreign powers like France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire got involved in the Italian mess).
To come back to lying/deceit/hypocrisy vs. murder: the Italian city-states employed condottieri (literally "contract men", or captains of mercenary gangs) in their unending wars against each other. Like any other mercenaries, these men largely fought, killed, and died for money, rather than any noble cause.
It is now possible to see how Dante thought that murder was the lesser sin. The condottieri committed the sin of murder, yes -- but compared to the great lords of the city-states who employed them, and whose double-dealings, treachery and betrayal was legendary, at least the coindottieri's sin of murder had a refreshing honesty about it (if I may be forgiven for calling murder "honest").
Incidentally, the mid-15th-century saw a seismic shift in the role of the condottieri, with the rise of Niccolò Piccinino and Francesco Sforza. Their rivalry defined and shifted the balance of power in central and northern Italy between 1430 and 1450, and ultimately transformed Sforza from a strategically-gifted, forward-thinking leader of fighters into the Duke of Milan. Piccinino, on the other hand -- a brilliant tactician, aggressive and ferocious, but not a deep thinker -- was consistently outmatched, and died in frustration in 1444, allegedly (according to legend) cursing Sforza's name.
His sons Francesco and Jacopo took up the fight, but their equally aggressive-but-unsubtle attacks couldn't defeat Sforza either, and Jacopo eventually married Sforza's daughter and made peace with him in exchange for confirmation of his lands (1463). He didn't live long to enjoy them. Two years later, he was betrayed by King Ferdinand of Naples, arrested and executed. Thus the Milanese House of Sforza was finally secure.
@Rath Darkblade this is not a history forum. Please limit your comments to direct questions and writing related topics. There are many places in the Internet where topics such as these can be discussed, but writingforum.org is not one of them.***Warning: longish and serious post, but worth reading - I hope***
Your rule of thumb moving forward is if you feel the need to put a warning about length before a post, please do not write the post unless it is directly related to writing.
My appologies. I wasn't talking about your post, which seems sincere. I was just going off on a tangent. Something I've noticed. But I should have prefaced that I wasn't refering to your use of the word.
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