Writing's a fight and this boy needs a battle
David Troy’s analysis of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover in BylineTimes is truly scary.
Musk’s takeover might not be the massive financial misstep it seems. Instead it’s the latest salvo of “totalitarian information warfare” that will, if it’s not stopped, lead us into “genocide and bloody kinetic war”.
Considering the players involved this isn’t hyperbole.
A film that piqued my interest by using an out of control variant of COVID as the backdrop.
At its core it’s a love story, set in the totalitarian regime imposed by attempts to control the deadly virus. It doesn’t try to find a new way of looking at either the love story or the virus, instead giving us a stream of familiar foes. The corrupt. The psychotic megalomaniac. The faceless military.
Imbedded, unquestioned, in the story is this very American idea that the power of love and individual freedoms are the ideal, and only true outcome for any such scenario.
Sienna Rodgers in Labour List announces that “Labour has launched a cross-party bid to block the possibility of the UK leaving the EU without a divorce deal”.
I think there’s more at stake than just blocking no deal.
This motion is only needed because there have been calls to suspend parliament. The fact that there is even talk of suspending parliament should scare everyone, even those on the side of Britain exiting the European Union.
Their argument was that we should wrestle back sovereignty from Europe, not give it to an elite group of self serving politicians. Suspending parliament is not acceptable under any circumstance. That’s us slipping and sliding, scrambling and scuffing, open eyed towards totalitarianism.
But that’s what happens when the world gets complicated, filled with nuance, and leaders frame every argument as a binary choice. I considered exactly this “totalitarian mindset” when I was working on one of my characters for CARR-10-N. This is an extract from something I wrote in 2013.
So the question I’m really asking is; what kind of person is attracted to totalitarianism? To answer that question you first need to ask; what allows totalitarianism to flourish? The short answer is uncertainty. In his paper “How to make enemies and influence people” (2) Alfonso Montuori characterises the “totalitarian mindset” as a response to the stress of contemporary pluralism. Basically we live in complex times full of ambiguity and uncertainty. We feel threatened. And when we’re backed into a corner we have a tendency to succumb to “simplistic, black-and-white solutions.” Montuori goes on to note that “individuals all over the world have sought relief from the uncertainty of a pluralistic world in the arms of absolute belief systems of a religious fundamentalist and/or political/nationalistic nature.”
2013/02/08
If that doesn’t describe the current mess nothing does. Jeremy Corbyn has been criticised for a “muddy” position on Britain exiting the European Union, but muddy’s what we need. We need nuance not black and white choices. Black and white choices are what got us here in the first place. There are no easy answers in any of this, but sleepwalking a totalitarian government into office is not the answer.
Finishing my last post brought an insight that means I’m ditching the first act, at least those scenes involving Adam and Reiner.
The ideas for this change bubbled up after a lot of research about Reiner’s totalitarian mindset. I’ve been concerned since the outset with the action that puts Adam in conflict with Reiner. The idea I’ve been working with, has his relationship with Christine provide the conflict, that pits the two men against each other.
But I’ve never really been happy with how that scenario plays out. It wasn’t strong enough, and doesn’t explain Adam’s decision to put his self-righteous attitudes to one side and save Christine. Neither does it explain the vitriol Reiner has for Adam.
What I’ve really been looking for is something that serves two functions.
First it has to force Adam to land definitively on Christine’s side. Second it has to make an absolute enemy of Reiner. I think I’ve found the solution in the hierarchical structure of the totalitarian regime. Reiner puts his standing with the regime on the line when he sponsors Adam’s induction. The price of admission is Christine, Adam must kill her. When he refuses, he not only puts himself on the wrong side of the regime, he also makes a mortal enemy of Reiner.
Adam is cast out, throw into a cell with Christine and John, condemn to suffer the fate of all junkies in the coming genocide. This changed scenario brings with it an inciting event that kick-starts the story. It allies him with Christine but lets her be an opponent. It gives Reiner a character specific reason to hate Adam.
This mirrors the final battle, resonating against Adam’s choice to help Christine commit suicide.
I hope that all makes sense, this really is me thinking out loud.
While writing about Reiner’s authoritarian personality I noted the polarisation of freedom and security.
The conflict between Adam and Reiner is a fight over the kind of world they will live in. “Will it be a world ruled by freedom or one ruled security?”
If Adam is to have a better life at the end, he has to reject the world of security demanded by Reiner, and make a positive choice for freedom.
The seed of this decision is sowed in the stories inciting event.
Adam has to do something that, to quote John Truby, “causes the hero to come up with a goal and take action”. The difficulty I have is that Adam and Reiner are part of the same tribe, they’re policemen in a totalitarian state that has built its identity on attacking drug users. Adam at some level shares this totalitarians mindset, he couldn’t be a policeman if he didn’t.
So what would make him question the orthodoxy?
If part of the totalitarian mindset, that Adam is part of, is the authoritarian personality exemplified by Reiner, an individual willing to belittle himself so he can, as part of something greater, become great himself, what startles Adam out of that delusion? My gut tells me the only thing powerful enough to force that kind of revelation in Adam, is a direct attack on Christine.
Whatever self-righteous stance he might take against her drug use, she’s still his sister, the only remaining member of his family. Whatever he believes at the beginning of the story, when she is attacked, he’s compelled to save her.
At present the inciting event happens as Reiner attacks a surrogate for Christine. Adam gets a call from her as Reiner beats the surrogate to a pulp. Reiner’s actions, and Christine’s plea for help, prompt Adam to abandon his post and go to help her.
The attack on Adam would need to be more sustained before he finally reject Reiner. Perhaps it’s in the symbiotic tendency of the authoritarian personality, seen in the tyrannical father who torments his wife but is subservient to his superiors. Perhaps Reiner uses Christine against Adam, he’s forced to choose.
Instinct tells me that’s actually the choice Adam has to make in the final battle, the last stepping stone that gets him to the freedom side of the river. What I’m looking for, is the first stepping stone on that journey.
I’m sure it has to be a direct attack on Christine. Reiner makes a move against Christine, which forces Adam to step in. His instinctive response puts him in direct conflict with Reiner.
With this choice made I now have to go back and restructure the first thirty five minutes of the plot.
I’ve been thinking about Adam’s main opponent Anthony Reiner, specifically what makes him such a willing exponent of prohibition? As I pondered in the comments of my previous post, “I’m trying to figure out the mechanism of his adherence to the cause. Why does he react so violently to Adam’s need to save Christine?”
Reading back over it I realised, Reiner reacts to Adam’s decision to help Christine as a betrayal of the cause, a reaction rooted in Reiner’s totalitarian mindset, a mindset that has no tolerance for ambiguity.
When he encounters the kind of complexity offered by Adam’s willingness to help Christine, he tries to impose his pre-existing frames of reference on the decision, reducing it to an us or them ultimatum.
Going back to Alfonso Montuori paper “How to make enemies and influence people” it’s interesting to note the kind of personality the totalitarian mindset attracts. Consistent attempts to suppress “complexity through maladaptive simplicity is characteristic of the closed-mindedness of the authoritarian personality”.
Montuori’s characterisation of the totalitarian mindset, as an authoritarian personality, fits perfectly with description I have of Reiner. For Reiner ambiguous situations cause anxiety, a stress he copes with by adhering to “a clear set of rules and regulations… imposed by whoever is in charge”.
While this might be described by John Truby as his psychological weakness, a weakness hurting only himself, it doesn’t describe his moral weakness, the weakness that is hurting at least one other person. It is clear to me now that Reiner’s moral weakness is explicit in his framing of drug users as an external threat. As Montuori notes “the perception of an out-group as a threat and an enemy is the glue that holds this (totalitarian) mindset together”. A distinction that’s at the very core of Carrion.
In this fiction, as in reality, drug users are universally defined as a threat, blamed for everything from social unrest to criminality. The prohibitionist routinely reduces the drug issue to a simple black and white choice, “if we sort out the drug problem everything will be all-right”.
In Carrion the threat from users becomes even more acute when they are attacked by the insects. It’s no coincidence that the government are behind the release of the insects. It serves two functions, first it’s an attack on the drug using population, uniting people against an identifiable enemy. Second it creates a crisis that allows drug users to be targeted for persecution.
In Carrion users are not only a threat to public order, now they’re a threat to public health, a threat that needs to be dealt with in the expedient, harshest, terms possible. Although it’s interesting to remember that when Hitler was asked whether he thought Jews should be annihilated he replied no. If we didn’t have them “we should have to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.”
In trying to answer the question, what makes Reiner such a willing exponent of prohibition, it’s become apparent that his willingness to persecute drug users is his moral weakness, a manifestation of the totalitarian mindset, embedded in the authoritarian personality, that is his psychological weakness.
Now all I have to do is work out his need, what he “must fulfil within himself in order to have a better life”.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Anthony Reiner, and struggling to understand what makes him such a willing exponent of prohibition?
Within Carrion prohibition is the product of a totalitarian regime. Totalitarianism is “a political system where the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life whenever necessary”.
The question I’m really asking is, what attracts a person to totalitarianism?
To answer that question we need to understand, what allows totalitarianism to flourish? The short answer is uncertainty. In his paper “How to make enemies and influence people” Alfonso Montuori characterises the “totalitarian mindset” as a response to the stress of contemporary pluralism.
Living in complex times full of ambiguity and uncertainty, we feel threatened, and when we’re backed into a corner we have a tendency to succumb to “simplistic, black-and-white solutions”. Montuori goes on to note that “individuals all over the world have sought relief from the uncertainty of a pluralistic world in the arms of absolute belief systems of a religious fundamentalist and/or political/nationalistic nature”.
Within the world of Carrion, the threat posed by drugs is lightning rod, a life-threatening danger, that allows the government to “drastically reduce ambiguity and complexity”. The forces of authority instinctively “fall back on a form of very simplistic… totalitarian thinking”.
Just as the Nazi’s persecuted the Jews, so the prohibitionist persecutes the drug user.
(I realise that this is only half finished but I’ve taken this idea as far as I can for today. My thoughts need further clarification so will have to wait for another post.)
Darrin // Nightingale 