Dangerous Fictions

in the fascist imagination, there must be a victim to be protected and an invasive enemy on the attack: if young people are adopting beliefs in multiculturalism, gender fluidity, and socialism, then someone must be forcing these ideas on their innocence.

it's dangerous to imagine human beings as less than human, especially when their oppression arises from already being perceived as less than human in the first place. A flat character is more than an aesthetic mistake: it's a political error too, even if placed in the service of good politics.

In fiction we set the parameters of reality… we imagine what can't be known. What we imagine—or, more specifically, what the publishing and film and TV and comic and video game development industry will fiscally allow to be perceived in the public sphere—separates what is taken to be reality and what must remain a dream.

so the figure of the heroic detective cop—in fiction and reality—stands in for someone who can solve the puzzle of reality, someone who can make us feel safe.

As with most modes of binary thinking, this creates superficial and destructive patterns: pretending that the conflict over pop culture is a simple battle between the right versus the woke corporatists allows the right to dictate the shape of reality, recasting diversity as a sincere corporate concern.

what makes fascist art uniquely frightening is that fascism itself can be described as a kind of factionalizing tendency, deliberately co-locating itself inside categories of thinking and feeling more normally reserved for literature and art. Fascism operates at the level of story; it works like a story, with violent heroes and monstrous villains.

there is no objectivity in taste, simply more or less intelligent expression of why you like or dislike something, an idea which may seem threatening or even dangerous if you're the sort of person who has based your identity on a sense of cultural superiority or on sensitivity to imaginary elitists who are sitting in judgment. The only truly "

Sometimes what's wrong with reality is deeper than individual moral failings; sometimes our problems are greater than an inability to see each other's point of view. And boiling everything down to a failure of individual understanding can work as a neat and deliberate deflection away from those problems.

The quickest way to kill many grown-ups' interest in a work of art is to label it as healthy and useful, to turn it into another productive chore. And the quickest way to kill fiction more generally is to declare that it exists to make you a better person, to train you into shape.