I don't think I'm going to CW this; I've been striving towards a style that's mild enough to pass muster as writing for the general public, and the general public ought to know how bigotry works, so...here I write.
I can't remember how old I was when I first encountered Isaac Asimov's Foundation. Even though Asimov isn't generally a great writer in terms of presenting human characters or writing in a compelling style, he's better than a lot of his "Golden-Age" fellows. Asimov is miles ahead of Arthur Clarke, for example, in terms of writing quality. He succumbed to old-hit-writer-itis, by which I mean that Asimov went back to his earlier writings late in life to muck around with world-building, and that did affect Foundation rather badly. But the earlier writings are pretty solid.
(more on the world-building fiasco later)
The premise of Asimov's psychohistory is that some abstract, collective understanding of human behavior en masse could be formalized and condensed into mathematical formulae, whence it would become much easier to predict future trends. The first few Foundation novels do a pretty good job of exploring this idea, along with the corresponding notion that there would need to be a counterbalancing force, a Second Foundation of parapsychologists—i.e. people with the ability to influence human minds directly—but Asimov couldn't figure out good ways to introduce complications, other than to postulate the existence of a "sport", a human being with unusually strong powers over the emotions of others, someone who would rival the abilities of the Second Foundation psychics. after that, there's only the problem of how the First and Second Foundations learn to get along somehow once the First learns of the Second, and then...what more can you do?
(I honestly don't remember the later books well enough to comment on them—I know he tries folding in his Robot stuff and it's not all that good.)
There's a great irony in all this: Asimov succeeded, where many have failed, in creating a truly self-contained microcosm. The original Foundation trilogy fully explores the consequences of psychohistory and comes to a happy ending that seems final. From what I recall, Asimov was a bit discomfited by this, feeling as though he'd surely missed something important, and I'm guessing that's what prompted the later Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth and stuff. Asimov was a reasonably good writer but he was also a rotten corporate huckster, a celebrity, and that surely corrupted his vision.
It's my general belief that the "intellectual dark web", i.e. the "scientific racists" if we're being more honest—they always seem to turn up, don't they—think that bigotry is their psychohistory, the thing that explains history. You can easily see why they'd want to believe this. It's such an appealingly simple idea! Reduce the peoples of the world to a relatively small collection of ethnic or national or social stereotypes (one can have endless intellectual arguments about which stereotypes are the best ones, the most comprehensive set) and suddenly the tides of civilization don't seem that complicated, no more complicated than a game of Civilization [Whatever].
I must here admit an incandescent, irrational hatred for civilization and war games is radiating from somewhere in the Pnictogen Wing. It's not Kris or myself anyway! Frisk seems placid enough on the subject—they've always been disgusted by games but not really hateful. One of the Heroic Spirits perhaps? Or not? So, yeah.
(Why DO we never have a pencil or pen handy, this sucks, our desk is hopeless)
(We may have a line on the hatred, which has a suspiciously Irish character, and I'm recalling what happened to Diarmuid in Fate/Zero)
That was an astonishingly difficult post to write! We have long known that the Pnictogen Wing has been hindered by numerous old problems. We didn't know we were forming dissociative introjects for a loooong time. We just had, you know, episodes! Unusually vivid and long spells of "daydreaming" and that sort of thing. We were "absent-minded" and a lot of other things. We have picked up much unwelcome baggage and we have had our hands full keeping it properly contained. Our focus gets knocked hither and thither by the whirlwind in our head!
Honestly...this is one of those nights when I wonder just exactly how it is we are still alive, much less someone with family and friends. I feel like we could have accidentally ended the world at least ten times over, merely because we were somehow adjacent to power, permitted to see it from a distance but never to interfere meaningfully. I have been one of the rabble. "Rebel scum," as Finn says, with particular savor.
Finn was dealt an especially shitty hand. I am far more fortunate, and I'm mortally tired of being a mess.
~Chara of Pnictogen
