Fiction, Morals, And Why Social Justice Warriors Are Bad For Media Companies

I often get these ideas for fictional plots, but I am picky, so I'll write something down somewhere and just forget about it after a while. I also tend not to think of fiction as very important, but then I start to realize how few people are in touch with reality. A case in point- the current kerfuffle about the forty-seven ronin (Republicans) writing some stupid letter to the Ayatollah. This is such a total non-story, yet it appears to be being pounded into the ground in the mainstream. I think I know why- it is the type of thing you can have a lot of sound and fury about, but absolutely no one is going to change their minds about anything. Harden up the lines for the coming elections.

Anyway, one of the things I realized is that morals to a story tend to improve a story. I had an idea for a Western- nothing particularly novel in and of itself, but the moral was rather simple- give up a rather psychotic push for fame, glory, revenge, etc- and go have a family, and generally do productive things.

This moral is a side effect of thinking about God as the God of the living, yet seeing a lot of 'morality' obviously not driven by this idea. Warmongers often use the saying, 'so they may not die in vain,' as a justification for sending more soldiers to their death, as if the previous deaths would somehow not be in vain if we just keep fighting for ever.

Our first priority is to those living now, and not to let anger over deaths that happened in the past encourage us to cause more deaths. Our second priority is to set up environment conducive to procreation- stable families, decent jobs, healthy food. If none of this exists, the soldier dies in vain, because he dies trying to 'defend' something that is not here.

So, perhaps writing modern day fairy tales is necessary to get simple ideas into this inane world.

I had another idea this morning- about the current progressive, social justice warrior nonsense, and how media companies are, ulitmately, going to have to toss these parasites off their backs if they want to make money.

SJW stuff is about being, it is wrapped in a warped version of Aristotle, in which, gender/identity/deviancy/etc- is a person's essence, and essences aren't filmable, so you have have some sort of 'doing', which is always half-hearted in a SJW piece, unless they are describing getting revenge on some perceived enemy, and/or trying to transgress some social norm in a lame attempt to establish essence. Perhaps this does not occur to the average SJW, but there are many, many people who just end up turning this sort of stuff off.

Doing, on the other hand, is imminently filmable, and you can establish a far firmer and richer impression of a character than you can via the essence route.
This would be because this is exactly how we do it in real life. We experience people doing things, never have direct access to essence, and develop our impressions of people via their actions. And every SJW emphasis on a particular aspect of identity as the essence of a person necessarily reduces that character down to a caricature.

Either the media companies start figuring this out, or they lose market share and die, like Mozilla is doing now that it gave up good code as its metric and installed adherence to the ideology as the metric instead.