You and the Problem of Serial Killers

 

 

 

Source: Netflix

 

 

 

My girlfriend and I recently caught up on the Netflix original series You. We tried to watch the first season last year as part of our pandemic binging but gave up because the writing is terrible, the pacing is sluggish to near glacial, with characters so paper thin we couldn't even enjoy it as trash viewing. 

The next two seasons make almost no improvements on these problems but we went in to both seasons knowing the major twists which sort of helped. In the second season, knowing that Love is a serial killer, too, added depth to a season that completely lacked it otherwise. Knowing that season three ended with Joe killing Love didn't make the things better but it did at least add a sense of purpose, however misguided, to a stereotypical suburban sitcom.

 

If I had to pinpoint the core problem of You, it'd be that it thinks serial killers are interesting. True crime has warped people's perception of serial killers to the point that we've lost sight of what we find interesting about them, which is figuring out how their lives shaped them into the killers they became. But as for the people themselves, they're nothing, almost universally pathetic losers whose only impact on the world is the destruction they left in their wake. 

At heart, serial killers are little more than flesh suits acting out their obsessions and compulsions. Media depictions of serial killers tend to portray them as addicts, as otherwise functional people consumed by their desires. This is a necessary step because if you portrayed serial killers as they are, they'd be completely unmarketable.

Consider a scenario, if you will. You are out in public when suddenly, your stomach rumbles in the exact wrong way. You scramble, looking for a place to go, wandering, doing a mental checklist of which places have restrooms at all, ones that are open to the public, or ones where you have to buy something to justify your presence. All the while, the pressure continues to build, working its way down your intestines, each step threatening disaster. Finally, you remember where you can go, you work your way there, your every thought on holding it together for just that much longer until you reach the stall, plop on the toilet, then at long last, experience the sweet relief of release. 

This is what serial killers are, all the time. Just the tension and panic over having to take a shit in public until they find the perfect place to release that tension all at once. For all the horror they bring out, that's all every one of them is, nothing more. 

Where this causes problems for You is that it annihilates its capacity for drama. For drama to work, characters have to be put in situations that force them to make decisions that cause conflicts in the core of their identity. Emotional peril, not physical threats, is what drama runs on so, if your main character is an emotional void who doesn't have an interior life, your dramatic options become somewhat limited.

The end result of this is that Joe is forever trapped in a loop. He's always going to be looking for his perfect woman, his perfect "love," except, he never will. Joe's search will never be complete because no woman will ever live up to his fantasy because there's always going to be the pesky complications that all these women are real people. They're always going to have quirks, interests, and goals outside of Joe's need to be the center of their universe so he's always going to reject them.

That doesn't mean that there's no way to make this work. The show could have enough self-awareness to flesh out the characters so we understand what a loser Joe is, that he is essentially a child crying after they threw their favorite toy in the garbage who lashes out at every one who tells him the situation is his fault. Except, they won't. The show really wants us to be on Joe's side and it plays so heavily into his point of view with his constant voice over that everything has to be written to match his perspective. 

Problem is, his view of the world is so incredibly shallow. Every woman is either helpless in need of his protection or the latest backdrop for his mommy projections. Men are universally threats or obstacles. That's it. That is the sum total of his relationships to the outside world. 

If the show had better writing, we could see people as they are rather than filtered through Joe's fishbowl lens, but then the conceit of the show would collapse in a heartbeat. This is what torpedoes the third season, funnily enough. 

 

Love and Joe are living in suburbia, raising their baby in a life Joe says he always wanted. He's with a woman who loves him, who not only knows he's a murderer but completely accepts it. In fact, the fact that Joe's a murderer is why Love loves him- she sees him as a man who will do literally everything to protect what's important to him. Which, in a sense, is true. What Love, and by extension, the writers, miss however is that the only thing important to Joe is Joe. Their relationship falls apart because Joe, by definition, cannot recognize the validity of Love's feelings, let alone his obligation to satisfy them. That Love places expectations on Joe, that she expects to carry his own weight in their relationship and be her partner destroys Joe's fantasy, prompting his rejection and kick starting his search for a new obsession.

 

To be clear, I don't think these events in and of themselves are where the show goes wrong. Joe's failure to be a person is an accurate portrayal of what a serial killer is. We see Joe in the most perfect, ideal relationship he could ever possibly be in which just exposes  how much Joe is missing, how little there is to him, how small and inconsequential he is. Where the show screws up is that it takes Joe's side, framing everything as if Joe is the victim of circumstance, a man doing his best only to be undone by a partner with ludicrous expectations.

 

You wants to have it both ways. They want Joe to be a threat, to be dangerous, but they don't want him to be guilty of anything. The writers go all in on Joe's quest for a soul mate because it papers over his crimes, it makes it easier for us to accept the murders because they're supposedly committed in pursuit of a higher purpose instead of a sad little man compensating for his inadequacies through the destruction of others.

This reluctance to make Joe responsible means that the show lacks any meaningful tension. We know the show has no interest in making Joe face any consequences for his actions so any time Joe's worried about getting caught, we know he's not, that he's going to get off scot-free so, why bother? (To just emphasize this point, Joe kills an enforcer for the Russian mob when he comes to collect a $50,000 debt. It's never mentioned again.) 

In the end, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's only natural that a show so committed to uncritically depicting a serial killer would end up as shallow as its subject. 

Fear and Loathing in Sparta

 

 

Just Some Rich Asshole Image by

Dejan Krivokapic from Pixabay

 

 

 

 

I wanted to do a companion piece to my review of The Bronze Lie because the book gave me a lot to think about but I felt it distracted from discussing Cole's work. Like I said in the review, part of Cole's objective was to break down the myth of Sparta to cut down on how modern day fascist movements use them around the world. This is an interesting political question because to me it says a lot about how the fears that were the heart of Spartan society lay at the heart of our own.

We have to be careful writing about Sparta because, as Cole mentions, we have no first hand account of what the Spartans thought of themselves. There are no Spartan historians, philosophers, poets -the most acclaimed Spartan poet was probably an Athenian - playwrights, basically, every avenue humans have used to express themselves over the entirety of our existent, Sparta leaves us nothing. Everything we know about Sparta comes from other people telling us about them, which means we're getting depictions from people who were contemporaries (Herodotus, Thuycidides, Xenophon) or people writing much, much later (Plutarch). All of these authors have their own agenda's in their depictions of the Spartans, so we have to phase everything we know about them through a filter of "What does this author get from depicting them in this way" and apply it to what we know about human behavior.

What's interesting is that this fuzziness makes the Spartans the most convenient historical analogue we have on hand. The lack of messy, contradictory details means we can project onto them whatever traits we find most desirable. Whatever we're afraid our own culture doesn't have, we can say the Spartans did, because who is around to argue otherwise? Cole rightly calls out the anxiety at the root of this behavior, ascribing to ancient civilizations what we are most of lacking in our own. Still, projections only work if there's something solid behind them which, in my opinion, that something is the fear.

If you're wondering what the Spartans were so afraid of, that's easy enough to answer: it was their slaves. As I pointed out in my review, the helots - Sparta's slave class - made up 90% of Sparta's population. And if that number makes  you question how such a small Spartan minority maintained control over such a massive slave population the answer is simple: murder. Lots and lots of state sanctioned murder. How it would work is that the ephors - a five-member executive council that partly governed Sparta - would declare war on the helots, allowing any Spartan citizen to kill helots at any time without fear of legal or religious sanction. Just to repeat that so there's no misunderstanding, every year, the Spartan government declared war on its own slave class so its citizens could murder said slaves at will with no repercussions.

Another method of control the Spartans employed was the krypteia, the final part of the Spartan agoge where the boys would go out in the fields, hiding during the day, then fan out at night, killing whatever helots they found or ones they had spied on and thought could cause the most trouble. 

Keep in mind, this is usually the fate of helot men. For the helot women, they got to live with the constant wondering if their family members would come home at night, and, of course, rape. We know the scale of this because the Spartans had an entire social class of the offspring of Spartan men and helot women. Called either the nothoi (it translates to 'bastards') or mothax, the men were sometimes sponsored into the agoge by wealthy Spartan families and fought with their masters in the hoplite phalanxes alongside their masters. But again, I feel the need to repeat this because the sheer scale of this problem almost boggles the mind so, one more, with feeling: Spartan men raped their women slaves so much they created a distinct social class as a result.

This then, is Spartan life. A life of leisure built on top of an unrelenting campaign of murder, rape, and terror. But like I said, these campaigns are built to make the helots more afraid of the Spartans than the Spartans were of their slaves. The Spartans lived in constant fear of their helots turning on them, to the point that the first thing the Spartan did after a devastating earthquake in 464 BC was to mobilize the army to quell a helot rebellion. This turned out to be a prescient move, because revolt the helots did.

We tend to limit our understanding of slavery to the concept of one human being owning another, then leave it at that. We don't think about all the cultural justifications that get built up to justify the practice. This usually means our thinking tends to drift into thinking of slaves as accepting of their condition or at the very least attuned to their station. Things get much messier if you consider that slaves apparent complacency was bought by the constant threat (and practice) of murder they lived under.

I feel that I cannot emphasize enough that the Spartans engaged in these barbaric practices because they were utterly terrified of their slaves revolting against them. They would have been keen to avoid any sign of weakness lest they give their slaves the idea that they could be over thrown. This then serves as a good example as to why the brutality of slave societies exists, it reflects the terror the masters live in the shadow of two simple facts: 1. there are far more slaves around then there are masters, and 2. should the slaves recognize this, you can't kill them all.

Slavery is the easy thing to beat the Spartans up about, though. We shouldn't forget that the other thing we should scorn them for is that they, as a culture, seemed dedicated to learning nothing. The bulk of Spartan military history runs from the first Messenian War which started in 743 BC to the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, a period of just under 400 years. Throughout that time, which Cole documents repeatedly, the Spartans are beset by the same tactical and strategic errors, seemingly never implementing any of the lessons their defeats should have taught them. So think that through, almost 400 years of constant fighting and the Spartan army shows no signs of adaptation, improvement, or flexibility over the centuries. There are some individual moments, like one battle where the Spartan general does a valiant job trying to break into the fort his army is seizing. That he doesn't succeed is because the defenders have more options to make their defense last than he has to attack, but, this is the one notable exception and we never see a repeat of this behavior. 

What should we make then, of a society so committed to ignorance that it would rather lose the same battles in the same way over and over again than adapt to its circumstances? On a side note, this is yet another reason why we should discard the idea that the agoge was a military academy - if you don't train your soldiers in the tactics of the battles they're going to be fighting, your goal isn't to train soldiers. If we wanted to emulate the Spartans than Cole's project wouldn't exist, mainly because it involved actual work but also because the bedrock on which the project rests is questioning what we've been taught and testing it against the evidence to see if the story holds up.

The last thing I want to touch on is that what Spartan society shows us is the danger of a society under elite capture. Practically every bit of work done in Sparta - the farming, weaving, smithing, weapon making, every bit of it was done to support the idle Spartiates who remember, literally did no work at all. This funneling of every possible resource into the minority concentration of Spartan hands left Spartan society hollowed out - it had no commerce, no trade, nothing to economically support itself. So when Sparta's power over their slaves broke, there was nothing for them to fall back on save their own image. To be fair, they've successfully sold that image for over a thousand years to every Western culture that's followed them. Still, I think that if all you have to trade in a society is a mirage of its heavily  disputed glory, it's safe to call that society a failure on multiple levels.

Cole has a lot of compassion for the Spartans, a feeling I do not share. The worst thing, in my opinion, about every slaver is that they have but one life to give in return for the thousands they destroy. No matter the personal struggles and triumphs of the individual Spartans, that their lives depended on the misery of literally hundreds of thousands of people makes those personal problems irrelevant in my eyes. On top of all that, the vampiric relationship the Spartiates had with the rest of society left the society powerless to adapt long-term to any of its problems which left Sparta as little more than antiquity's version of Branson, Missouri.

Cole is right though that we should avoid casting the Spartans as monsters. History isn't a morality play for later generations to sift through for heroes and villains to venerate or scorn as we see fit. Everything the Spartans struggled with are things we struggle with now, with much of the same dynamics at play. You can't tell me there are so many industries going on strike because workers are getting fair treatment from their employers. Or that the shortages we're experiencing because of the monopoly consolidation in the shipping industry has made our societies more resistant to systemic shocks.

The problems of oppression and exploitation aren't unique to Sparta. These problems exist in every political, economic, and social system we've ever invented. We need to recognize that the Spartans are all too human, that their failures are our own, failures that we've repeated for thousands of years before and since. Most importantly, we need to recognize the Spartans as human because if nothing else, we need to recognize ourselves in their actions so that, if nothing else, we can resolve to do better than those assholes ever did. 

Clay, Not Cornerstone

We have this idea that the law is inherent and immutable. It exists to protect us, to create order in what would otherwise be a chaotic, brutal world. But like every other aspect of society, the law is merely an invention, something we created along the way to make things run as we believed they should. As with any other invention, the law can be tinkered with, abused, or just outright ignored as needed. 

The Texas abortion law is one of a few recent examples of this practice. Under the law, all abortions are banned - including pregnancies that result from incest and rape - after six weeks. If any woman gets an abortion after that time, the law allows any U.S. citizen to sue not only the woman but the doctor who performed the abortion, anyone who gave her money to pay for it, anyone who gave her a ride, along with anyone else who could conceivably said to have "aided and abetted" in acquiring the abortion. Should the plaintiffs win their civil suit, the law requires judges to impose at least a $10,000 fine on the defendants, payable to the plaintiffs.

There are a litany of problems with this law. For one, abortion is a federally guaranteed constitutional right, up until the point of fetal viability. Banning abortions at 6 weeks on its own makes the Texas law inherently unconstitutional but, like I said, there are other problems, too. The whole point of the bounty system is for Texas to try to avoid an official state punishment against women who seek or get abortions. Its supposed to be an end run around the law, basically the official version of "You can't blame me for the things I let other people do." 

Obviously, I don't have the legal background to say definitively whether or not Texas declaring open season on women and their support networks while awarding bounties to pro-lifer vigilantes amounts to those vigilantes qualifying as state actors but, still. It's an incredibly obvious question to bring up, one which I expect will be argued at length as the challenges to the law make their way to the Supreme Court. 

The other, other problem the Texas law has is that it makes an absolute mockery of standing. In the legal world, standing is basically the concept that if you have suffered a specific harm, you have the right to sue to repair that harm in court. Larger point being, standing isn't exactly something you can just grant to people willy-nilly, there still has to be some form of active harm done to people bringing the lawsuit, especially when it comes to civil actions.

Part of why I think the bounty system won't survive contact (at least at first) with the court system is that there is no compelling argument in favor of it that doesn't involve the pursuit of state interests. What specific harm, for example, does anyone in Dallas suffer if a woman in El Paso gets an abortion? What possible injury could they cite as reason for the lawsuit? The state can claim this harm because it represents the whole of the community, so it can take action to protect what it sees as public interest. Except, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey have slammed this door closed. These cases established and defined abortion as a constitutional right under the 14th amendment which limited the options states could use to directly crackdown on abortion. Even with a Supreme Court willing to indulge Texas' nonsense (we'll deal with this in a minute) required Texas had to invent this bounty scheme in the first place. But, like I said, standing isn't something you can conjure out of thin air, some part of it has to be conferred in order for it to work. 

Push against this feature of the law even just a little and it quickly falls apart. There is no basis for any random citizen to sue another for pursuing medical treatment they don't like. The only possible justification I can think of is that these suits are in the public interest but, again, private individuals don't have this because they cannot prove they've suffered a distinct or palpable injury which is a constitutional requirement for any lawsuit to work. These vigilante cases only legal authority then would have to come from the fact that these private individuals are acting as proxies for the state which, brings us right back to constitutional hard stop set up by Roe and Casey.

Whether any of this matters is an open question. With a 6-3 majority, the conservative wing can lose Roberts but still sit comfortably with a 5-4 ruling in favor of Texas. I've made a big deal about how flagrantly unconstitutional the Texas law is but, if the Supreme Court wants to, it can change the definition of "unconstitutional" whenever they want. Move to limit corporate spending in elections? Well, by our own doctrines, corporations are people, money is speech, therefore, campaign finance restrictions are unconstitutional. It's incredibly easy to alter the bedrock legal principles that our whole system is built on so, the next year will be somewhat nerve wracking as we wait to see whether or not women's bodily autonomy is something the Supreme Court is interested in protecting. 

Because for all the muddling the pro-life movement does, abortion is a bodily autonomy issue. Yes, a fetus is involved, but that does not make it the central issue. In order for the fetus to survive, it must use the the food, blood, and oxygen among many, many other things, of its mother. Here's the important thing- nothing and no one is allowed to use your body against your will. If you are in the hospital and another patient needs a blood transfusion to live, the hospital cannot take your blood because, bodily autonomy. Even when we die, our organs cannot be harvested to save others is we did not consent to do so when we were alive. It is a irony of their position that the so called pro-lifers dream world is one where a corpse has greater dignity and sanctity than a living woman.

There are no fundamental differences between a pregnancy or the above situations. The main objections against lumping all these things together usually bring out nonsensical arguments or religious ones about how, in the case of abortion, because sex was involved, that was the woman's choice so pregnancy is just her avoiding responsibility for her decisions. Which, honestly, your religious beliefs are your own but are ultimately irrelevant. If you believe that life begins at conception, that every fetus has a soul, and that every abortion is ending all the potential of a human life, fine, I'm not saying you can't believe that. What I am saying you can't do is turn around so that everyone has to live your creed, because that isn't caring or loving.

If your goal is to make sure every baby comes into the world with a family who loves and care about them, banning abortion won't do that. Because instead of love, this law uses the power of the state to make every woman afraid, afraid to go to their doctor, afraid to ask for help, afraid to do anything other than keep her head down and just try to figure it out however she can. This law is designed to cut pregnant women off from any and all decisions other than having their child and, much more insidious than that, place any one who helps them do anything else in legal peril. What love is to be found in fear, desperation, and isolation? 

This is why so much work is done by pro-life groups to make the whole abortion argument about the life of the fetus. Yes, it does function to muddle the discussion as a whole and wastes an inordinate amount of time not only trying to refute subjective moral and religious questions but also trying to move the argument to the actual issues abortion deals with. All that said, the rhetoric is primarily for their own internal consumption so they feel galvanized to pursue the goal. It also serves as a soothing mental balm as the contradictions of your stated goals about the sanctity of life being achieved by the reality of grinding an entire segment of the population under heel. Something has to square that circle, so in comes the pursuit of life itself above all else to trump the concerns of robbing women of their independence and dignity.

Another interesting aspect to notice here is that while Texas is flagrantly breaking the law, any prospective punishment is largely theoretical at this point. Which, again, shows that the law is largely a social construction that is unevenly applied. If you has an individual did something that so blatantly violated the constitutional rights, you'd be screwed. But a state does it? Not only do they get away with it, they get the chance to rewrite things so their illegality becomes the law itself.

One of the most common flexes of supposed first world countries like the United States is that we are a nation of laws. The idea is that we have risen above the barbarity of simply ruling by force of violence, that we have evolved into a system based on reasoned laws, applied equitably and dispassionately with only the occasional lapse brought about by individual bad actors. Except, laws are

tools. We wield them as we will to make the world a better place or to wrap people in chains. We use the law to put distance between us and the consequences of what we want. If something terrible is legal or the law does evil work we throw our hands up, say "what are you gonna do, it's the law," and move on. 

But the law, and its consequences, are only what we want them to be. It's never been anything more or anything less.

The Pigeon Hole of Optimization

Because I'm not playing DnD at the moment, I'm stuck doing the next best thing- going online to stalk forums so I can read other people talk about DnD.

Sometimes I worry about my fellow players. Optimization is so dominant in conversations about the various classes we have to choose from, which, to some degree, I get. Like anything, there's always going to be a debate about what the "best" classes or features in the game are. Every one has their favorites, but if there's going to be any kind of honest ranking there has to be some kind of objective metric to stack all these disparate options against each other.

 

To do this, we turn to good ol' fashioned maths. People will sit endlessly arguing about why the average damage rolls for one set of class options makes their preference better than someone else's and again, I get it. If you want to compare basketball players, you look at their numbers so, why wouldn't you do the same here? The point of getting your party together is to go around hitting monsters until they die, so it follows that whatever character options increase the amount of damage you do are superior. More damage, after all, means things die faster, meaning you have an easier time winning.

Now, before I get too far into this, I want to make it clear that I don't have anything against knowing any of these things. Taking a minute to get down into the raw numbers of what each class is capable of is a good way for a player to make an informed decision about what kind of character they want to create and what they want that character to do in their game. But if optimization becomes the only way you view the game, your perspective risks becoming overly narrowed. To highlight this, I want to talk about my favorite class, the monk. 

Go to any board on reddit, DnD Beyond, or anywhere that talks about DnD and the universal complaint you'll find about the monk is the classes d8 hit die. 

It's almost impossible to keep up with the other martial classes with their d10's (or d12), even if you have a decent constitution modifier of +3. The averages just aren't in your favor so, sooner rather later, if you're playing with another martial class, you're bound to feel some hit point envy as your game goes on. 

Every source points to this as a major drawback to the classes design (which we'll loop back to) but the binary focus of optimization leaves a lot to be desired even just on judging the attributes each class receives. 

Monks get a lot of defensive maneuvers to protect their somewhat paltry hp pool. Deflect missiles will protect you from pretty much any ranged weapon attack the moment you get it at 3rd level. The only times I took damage from ranged weapons was if I had already used my reaction to cancel out another attack. 

By 10th level, monks have Evasion, Stillness of Mind, and poison immunity. To put into prospective how effective these all are, let's pit the monk against some of the most popular enemies in the game: dragons. 

Of the five chromatic types, three breath weapons are matched against dexterity saving throws, which, because you have Evasion, if you make the saving throw you take... zero damage. Even if you fail, you still only take half damage. You don't even have to roll against the green dragons breath because you're immune to poison. So out of five of the most devastating monster attacks in the game, monks potentially suffer full damage from just one of them. 

Oh, and the terrifying presence all the dragons have? If you fail, use an action for Stillness of Mind to rid yourself of the terror, spend a ki point to go into Patient Defense, and you're all set to get back in fray on your next turn. 

Still, even with all those defenses, you're still vulnerable. Things could go wrong, you could roll poorly, and then, well, then you're in trouble. 

This isn't a design flaw. It's a choice meant to introduce risk because with risk comes choices and with choices come drama, aka the good stuff that makes the game enjoyable. 

As a monk, you can get pretty much anywhere on any battle map your DM draws up. If monks had a d10 hit die, players would take off at every opportunity, safe in the knowledge that even if things didn't go quite as they hoped, they had a bit of slack from an hp pool that can absorb one or two bad hits.

With a d8, though, players don't have this safety. Which is good; combat has to be dangerous to be effective. So while you can get up close and personal with your end-boss lich mage, should you is the question. In that split second decision lies danger and glory, it's impossible to have one without the other.

It's important to remember that Dungeons and Dragons is a narrative experience. For narrative to work, there has to be tension and combat isn't exempt from that. The three pillars of combat, exploration, and social interaction form the narrative triangle of the game. Combat, at heart, is just another way to express your character. In the case of the monk, the d8 is a limitation which forces players to make choices. And it's choices, not stats, not average damage per round, not any quantifiable metric, that defines characters. 

Combat isn't the only area to suffer from this mode of analysis. Another monk feature that gets universal dismissal is the one at 13th level, Tongue of the Sun and Moon. The feature grants monks the ability to understand, and be understood by, anything that speaks a language. It's a pretty cool feature, honestly, yet, as one breakdown of the class said, it's "of limited value for many monks given that charisma is the most common dump stat." 

This is why the idea of optimization is especially limited- it encourages players to see the "best" attribute in a situation as the only way to do something. Yes, charisma is the stat that gives characters their primary social skills. It does not, however, give you a good tool set for figuring out if the people on the other side of the conversation are being entirely truthful. For that, you need a good wisdom score to get a good bonus to your insight checks. And, wouldn't you know it, wisdom is the second most important stat for a monk to have. What a coincidence.

 

The lack of imagination around what this feature would allow players to do is somewhat worrying. To me, it reads as the designers knowing that monks don't usually invest in traditional social skills, so they gave them an ability that grants players an avenue to participate in social interactions in a way that was supported by the classes core stats. 

 

Beyond the mechanical level, the role playing opportunity of a character being able to speak every language because they have gained an understanding of the connection between all living things, of the oneness of all life, is incredible. Which is why it honestly baffles me that all the narrative and character possibilities get cast aside because it doesn't line up with one stat and optimization brain doesn't allow for any other creative possibilities.

At heart, what I see in optimization is the fear of failure dressed up as a design philosophy. Characters can only be highly specialized into doing what they're "supposed" to be good at, while anything their design may not automatically support is to be avoided at all costs. If you want to design a character who acts as the most efficient killing machine around, sure, I can see what the appeal is. But if you want a more well rounded character who incorporates their strengths and weaknesses into the narrative experience, this well runs dry incredibly quickly. 

 

Obviously, knowing the most effective uses of your characters abilities is important. Even so, the best way to use that information is knowing when you can use those abilities to be reckless, daring, maybe even a little stupid. Take a risk, be creative, be okay with failing, trust me. The worst that can happen is you have fun in a way you didn't think you could.

These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For

Over the last two weeks, controversies about cancel culture have spread across Facebook and Twitter like a brain rotting fungus infecting every edgelord or cranky uncle it came across. The latest hysterics came after the Dr. Seuss Foundation announced it was pulling six books from publication because of racist drawings and then again when news broke that a scene with Pepe le Pew was cut from the new Space Jam movie. 

There's a lot to unpack about why this is so ridiculous and why we're all the stupider for it, but, to clear things up, neither of these things are examples of anything getting cancelled. No one called for the Dr. Seuss books to get pulled from publication, it was something the company decided on their own because they don't want to be associated with images like these anymore.

It's important to note the real problem underlying the Dr. Seuss books isn't that the books were pulled, it's that they were pulled without a fight. 

Even if you take the view that the books were for purely economic reasons- i. e., they did it to protect the brand - what that says is that the Dr. Seuss Foundation looked at their products, looked at the potential damage the controversy could do to their non-racist books, and decided that their better option would be to just recall the titles with those drawings. Even in this telling, which is nothing more than a stripped down cost-benefit analysis, the reactions of Asian and Black communities were deemed important enough that the mere potential of the financial harm they could leverage was enough to change their practices. 

I'm not saying that's how it went down, just using it as an example that no matter how you look at this, this decision was made because the Foundation thought how their minority customers felt about their product, mattered. They thought it was important enough to do something about it without anyone pressuring them to do so. 

What all those headlines about political correctness gone too far are saying is that people who weren't important in the past, are important now. It's amazing how much this simple recognition bothers people, like they can't stand living in a world were other people are important, too. That's all any of this is, all any of it ever is, just blind anger over the fact that minorities get to have a say in the world they live in.

As for the Pepe le Pew thing, his scene got deleted when Space Jam changed directors. This is what's called making a movie. If this upsets you, I congratulate you on living a life with no actual problems. 

What annoys me most about all the outrage pieces over cancel culture is that they universally don't engage with why such a thing would exist in the first place. If they do, it's usually just complaining about how kids get so offended at everything these days. Which, yeah, if you look for people being stupidly upset over inoffensive things you're going to find them, obviously. Conveniently, the push to make this solely about overly sensitive millennials and Gen Z'ers let's people with actual power off the hook for making things this bad in the first place. 

Consider the world since the start of the millennium. We had Bush II lie his way into starting a war, operate a global torture regime, launch an illegal spying program, with no consequences. Then, the global economy burns to the ground in the fallout of fraudulent trading and business practices from literally the entire financial sector. Then, the same banks get caught actively laundering money for the Sinaloa drug cartel, rigging interest rates, and stealing money from their customers. No one went to jail or was even arrested for any of this, naturally. That's not to say we were limited to white collar villainy. For more blue collar scumbags, we have the cops who killed Eric Garner, Michael Brown or Tamir Rice - for just a small sampling - who all walked away clean after killing unarmed civilians. 

Then, Donald Trump happened. If there's any lesson from the Trump administration, is that people in power get away with whatever they want because other people in power choose not to stop them. Mitch McConnell could've pulled Trump's leash anytime he wanted by slowing down Trump's pet projects in the Senate until Trump behaved like a good little dog on camera, but that never happened. The Democrats could've decimated Trump's agenda by passing budgets that didn't allocate money for the wall, or the Space Force, or for any of the other ridiculous projects Trump undertook. But they didn't, because why would they? Sure, Trump himself is an asshole, but he's still President and this is still America. That Biden is continuing some of Trump's policies- like keeping the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and supporting failed puppet Juan Guadio in Venezuela - show for the umpteenth time that Washington's problem with Trump was his personality, not his actions.

You can't expect people to look at the world, see all the open, unpunished corruption, and do nothing about it. Normal people can't arrest anyone, can't throw them out of office on a whim, but they can mobilize online to publicly shun or humiliate people off social networks. That's what cancel culture is, a response to offi cial failures to hold obvious criminals accountable so that someone, somehow suffers for the shitty things they've done. 

Naturally, there are pitfalls to this. Mass public outrage doesn't leave room for nuance or a sense of scale; for example, when Kathy Griffin posted that picture holding Trump's decapitated head, all that called for was a "wow, that's a bit over-the-top and desperate," not the massive dog piling she ended up buried under.  

It also acts as convenient cover for actual censorship, like when YouTube took down videos by independent news channel Staus Coup. The videos in question were coverage of the Capitol Riot, they weren't endorsing or advocating, just standard reporting. Corporations always move to co-opt the language of social movements to neuter their momentum, cancel culture gives them fertile ground to move against independent creators in the name of "protecting" the discourse from controversial elements. 

Critics of cancel culture are right that it's not good to rely solely on mobilizing mass movements of angry people against new outrages of the week. That what's happening isn't so much accountability as it is the public devouring of randomly selected individuals and doesn't address the systemic issues that allowed the harm in the first place. 

All of that is true, but to spend all the energy tsk tsking cancel culture as a sign of national decline seems more like a modern version of hating on hippies more than anything else. Cancel culture is the product of larger failures, not the cause of them. 

The easiest way to end cancel culture is to tear down the failed institutions that spawned it. Sure, there will always be people railing against something or other but if we can get the world to a place where assholes get punished for their asshole shit as an everyday thing, then at least we'll get to choose how much we want to stick around to listen. 

Nothing Fails Like Success

In 218 BCE, Hannibal Barca marched his army in Spain over the Alps into Italy, launching what's now known as the Second Punic War into full gear. For the next two years, he would humiliate one Roman army after another which culminated with the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE.

If you've ever watched any show covering battles of the ancient world on the History Channel or YouTube, you've probably heard of this battle. It's famous for Hannibal's Carthaginian army pulling off a double envelopment- basically, Hannibal's army was able to completely surround the Roman army. Out of 86,000 troops, only 15,000 made it out unscathed with almost 50,000 dead and the rest captured by the Carthaginians. 

To this day, military historians lose their shit and marvel at the tactical brilliance of this battle, one of the worst defeats ever inflicted on any Roman army, and use it as the jumping off point for alternate histories where Carthage, not Rome, becomes the sole power of the Mediterranean world.

Also, Cannae is why Hannibal loses the war.

Up until this point, Hannibal's strategy revolved around luring the Romans into battle so he could crush them with clever tactics. The Romans, arrogant honor junkies that they were, obliged him without fail. Its only after Cannae that the Romans decide that a man named Fabius Maximus may have been on to something when he said "How 'bout we don't walk into obvious traps that get us slaughtered?" Following his lead, the Roman army avoids any direct contact with Hannibal's forces. For ten years. Ten long, long years with no major battles. 

This was fatal to Hannibal's war effort. The whole point of his strategy was to show the other Italian cities that Rome wasn't as strong as they thought, that if they joined up with Hannibal, they'd be much better of then sticking with their pompous, condescending neighbors. Once the Romans stopped rushing out to die at his feet however, Hannibal had a major problem. 

See, his crossing of the Alps severely weakened his army. He didn't have the numbers or the supplies to lay siege to Rome, which meant he also didn't have the show of strength necessary to convince the Italians to throw in with him unconditionally. All the cities he turned flipped back to the Romans once Hannibal was out of sight which meant he spent years going all over Italy taking back cities he'd already won, then lost, back to his side. 

As any gamer knows, backtracking is a soul crushing endeavor that, ultimately, accomplishes nothing. With no momentum to his side, it was only a matter of time before the war slipped through Hannibal's fingers which, it did when the man who became known as Scipio Africanus beat Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE.

Skipping ahead a few centuries, let's meet Diocletian. In 284 CE, Diocletian was proclaimed emperor by the troops under his command after the last two self-proclaimed emperors died in battle. Now, at the time, the Roman world is going through the Crisis of the Third Century which, as you can probably tell from the name, is a great time to be alive. Civil wars, invasions, plagues, whatever flavor of catastrophe you prefer, you'll find it on offer in the 200's CE.

Being a rather industrious fellow, Diocletian decides to solve the problems that have beset his home and put right what has obviously gone wrong in the world. And then, he does. He defeats all his military rivals foreign and domestic. Once that's settled, he carves the empire into smaller districts to ensure any ambitious generals can't proclaim themselves emperor with a sizeable army at their backs like they've been doing for the last 50 years. Diocletian then divides the empire into four distinct districts ruled over by himself, his co-Emperor and two junior emperors who all pursue Diocletian's vision of unity and stability with aplomb. 

With the empire in good standing, Diocletian retired to his vegetable garden in 305 BCE. Less then twenty years later, the system of succession Diocletian so painstakingly crafted will be just as dead he is. 

When Diocletian retired, he forced his co-Emperor Maximian to step down with him. Overall, it was the smart play- Maximian served as a glorified general elevated to serve the imperial will of Diocletian wherever Diocletian couldn't be physically present. As the next five years would show, Maximian didn't have a political bone in his body, so the idea of leaving him in charge of the Empire was an invitation to disaster.

Sidebar: The cliff notes of Maximian's life from 305-310 are as follows: He helps his son Maxentius rebel in 306 after he's left out of the new tetrarchy, Maximian then betrays  Maxentius to take the reigns of power for himself. When that fails, he runs East to his son-in-law Constantine, declares himself Emperor, gets forced out of the declaration by Constantine, tries to seize power from Constantine, fails, then is forced to commit suicide to end the world suffering his foolishness any longer.

So, while leaving Maximian in charge was unacceptable, this only bred a deeper problem that Diocletian seemed incapable of understanding. When Diocletian created the tetrarchy, it was clear that while they were all relatively equal in their authority, Diocletian was more equal than all of them. Removing himself and Maximian created a power vacuum that his chosen successors would spend the next twenty years seeking to fill.

Eventually, Constantine would come out on top then establish Constantinople as the new heart of the empire, which would continue on for another 1200 years. But to Diocletian, the idea that the empire fell back under the rule of one central authority represented nothing but the failure of his life's work. 

It's hard to be too judgemental, though. Because of his reforms, the empire would survive as a unified whole until the Western half fell in 410 CE. His organization of the empire into smaller dioceses would lay the foundation the Catholic Church would use as it spread after the Roman world fell into chaos. His monetary policy would, in part, pave the way for Roman currency to regain its value which made it easier to keep soldiers in line since they were being paid in worthwhile currency again.

When your entire adult life consists of pulling off one miracle after another,  it's easy to think that the rest will just take care of itself. Everything else has worked, so why not that?

But like with Hannibal some 400ish years earlier, Diocletian didn't take into account how his success would change the world he lived in. Having four emperors during a time of crisis is fine- it means all of them have lots of problems to solve all at once all the time. But once the crises passes, all they've got to look at is each other. Who would be happy with a sliver of ultimate power when you could easily have it all?

That's the irony of the whole thing- the tetrarchy was created to stave off the civil wars that plagued the Roman world for fifty years but once the problems of the empire were handled, civil war between the tetrarchs was the only possible outcome.

To bring this closer to home, we go to 1971. Eugene Sydnor, then president of the Chamber of Commerce, commissioned a memo from his friend Lewis Powell. Powell was a corporate lawyer who worked for Philip Morris and was two months away from his nomination, and eventual appointment to, the Supreme Court. 

The result, known as either The Powell Memo or The Powell Manifesto, advocated for corporations to take a more proactive role in protecting their political interests. He suggested that the Chamber of Commerce should hire scholars to make the intellectual case for unregulated capitalism, monitor text books and TV news for unfavorable content, and to use their donations to colleges to influence those institutions to hire faculty more receptive to corporate interests. 

It's hard to overstate the consequences of this memo. All of Powell's suggestions were put in place, which led to the creation of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, among others. Combined with the creation of Fox News and conservative radio, the conservative political agenda veered hard to the right.With the addition of the evangelical right, these principles took on a millennial, religious aspect, with a dash of apocalypse if they weren't pursued.

This didn't go unnoticed across the aisle. Spurred by the humiliating defeat of George McGovern, a new wing of the Democratic party began to form with the goal of moving the party away from its socially conscience, liberal image. The election of Bill Clinton solidified the control of the Third Way Democrats which they still enjoy to this day. 

The failure of all this realignment should be obvious. With Republicans actively hostile to social welfare programs and Democrats afraid of them, when crisis strikes it leaves millions of people in the lurch. So that's why you find both parties sitting on their hands as millions of people risk losing their homes, their health insurance, or just straight up starving as the pandemic rages unopposed. 

How these failures will change us is still up in the air. But you can't have the government abandon its citizens to cruelties of their fate without repercussions. Given how far the idea that enterprise is the only real freedom we have, I don't have high hopes. You can't bind yourself to your neighbor and demand better for everyone in a country that sees solidarity as a communist plot. 

We're told that failure is more instructive than success because it forces us to confront our shortcomings. In this way, failure leads to success as we improve, evolving our methods until we find the combination we need to get what we want. 

But we're never really taught that the inverse is true, too. We never get taught that we have to adapt to the world our success creates. Instead we're taught to expect that the world will stop to bask in our glories, that one success will endlessly breed further triumphs.  

That complacency is a trap. It inevitably leads us to disaster and yet, we've never bothered to learn to avoid it. If we come out of this calamity in one piece, we should probably start.