The Grasshopper #59: Fear?
It seems to drive many writers
It’s a wild world out there with no signs of that changing. Here in the US shootings have become a daily occurrence in many towns and cities. Politicians depend on fear of the different to divide and inflame people. And then, of course, there’s climate change.
Sheesh.
I write about all these things, more or less daily, but fear is not my driver. Outrage and disgust sometimes but, as a Buddhist, I know these negative emotions can wear you out, so I try to retain an optimistic view of life. Not an idealistic view, a forward-looking view.
When you look at the racks of new fiction in bookstores or libraries you see so much writing based on fear and the vicarious thrills it can generate. Horror, goth, murder mysteries, sword and sorcery fantasy- all these genres depend on the dark side of human nature and, to be honest, I’m not much interested in reading or writing them.
We’ve got enough of the real thing in the daily news.
Here on Substack there is a feature called Notes that launched in the past few months. It’s a Twitter-style feed for readers and writers. Surprisingly, my feed there is pretty focused on the positive, unlike Mr Musk’s bizarre remaking of Twitter.
He says he is a champion of free speech in any form, but that manifests in a lot of hate. And incidentally, he is so dedicated to his version of free speech that he has banned all links to any Substack newsletter. Free speech indeed.
It’s hard to understand why billionaires are so willing to spend their money and power on sowing fear. Maybe it’s good business, but there is plenty to be said for doing positive things instead.
I’m not a Twitter user and never have been. I have an account but my mind could never get around the constant firehose of information, opinion, news, fake news, etc. If you’re feeding off that hose, you will risk getting polluted and paranoid.
I guess this is me asking for a little decency in the world and asking writers to think through our motivations for why and what we write. Balance, not unicorns and daisies. With words it is too easy to create fear and division and to possibly push unstable people off the deep end into an alternative paranoid view of the world.
If you don’t think words have immense power, look at what they do to those individuals who take guns into public places and start shooting at people they will never know. Musk’s embrace of book banning and censorship is not a minor thing. It has already killed people.
The guy should stick to rockets and cars and get out of the hate business. And writers need to understand how easy it is to slip into darkness when most of your work is based on fear.
Civility and decency
It’s hard for me to not write about the explosion of AI-driven communications technology that is seemingly everywhere all at once. As a writer I can easily imagine its effect on virtually everything we create. Unfortunately the potential for the dark side of this stuff is off the charts.
I’ve written about how this already should have us questioning the veracity of virtually everything we read, see, or hear on digital media. And it brings me to the question of what we, as consumers and creators of information, can do to try and detect reality in the information.
With things like Photoshop and CGI it was already getting hard to know what was real and what was generated, but now it’s at a whole other level. Virtually anyone can do it.
I do have a thought about how we look at this stuff on a non-technical level to try and make our own choices. I look for signs of civility and decency that ring true. AI chatbots, no matter how sophisticated, are not sentient. They can’t feel or understand feelings.
Civility and decency are things we feel at a gut level. We know it when we see it, unless we are consumed by blinding anger and hate. I may disagree with someone about politics, for example, but if I sense a willingness to be civil I can have a dialogue and try to understand their point of view. And if we both exercise the ability to agree to disagree, respecting each other in the process, then we can have a truly human interaction.
I’m a little late getting this issue of The Grasshopper out. I spent the long Memorial Day weekend doing non-writing things, helping my friend in her garden, cooking, and enjoying a drink here and there. No regrets!
So this is a shorter issue than usual but I do not have a rule about a minimum or maximum word count, though it typically comes in at around 1200-1500 words. That’s not planned and it won’t be. This conversation is a labor of love, not a task.
Did you write today?
Martin
840 words
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"It’s hard to understand why billionaires are so willing to spend their money and power on sowing fear" What is hard about it. -they are NOBODIES. So they stand to gain by sowing fear. They are fear-driven. Wow, Martin. Thought that that was Edic's thesis, jeez....
This piece really rang true for me. I find myself questioning everything I read now, wondering how much is actually true and how do I know that. I write about food and how it affects the mind and body and I've come across of lot of posts that are just half-truths.. When it comes to health information AI will likely kill a lot of people. I think moving forward will come down to finding authentic voice - like yours - and being able to have trusted sources. What else can we do?