10/18/24 When you're writing a character for a book, it's common to "develop" that character. Give it a name, a backstory, ideologies, and a reason for living the life that it does. Without those elements, the character would be called "one-dimensional" - flat. Not realistic. Why is that? Every person on this [pale blue dot](https://www.siue.edu/~gdondan/pbdot.html) has a story. They have a family of some kind, living or dead. Maybe they have pets. Maybe they work at the grocery store, or maybe they're going to college- or, maybe, they're living at the local nursing home. It's easy to relegate the people you walk by in your local coffee shop to *background characters*. People that exist for the 15 minutes that it takes to get your order, and then you never see them again. There's a lot of people in the world. To them, *you're* the background character; there for 15 minutes and then gone. This happens, I think, because it wouldn't be reasonable to expect a single person to care about everything they do and everyone they see. We automatically filter out things we consider "normal". If we constantly, actively felt the sensation of the shoestring in our fingers as we tied our shoes every morning it would take hours to get them laced up and we'd feel terrible after. The same thing happens with people: we generalize and make assumptions because otherwise we wouldn't be able to see another human being without hours or days of agonizing over every aspect of their life that **we can't even know**. These generalizations are easier to remember, anyway. They make things simple, and simple is easy and safe. It's like a really nice three-to-four-syllable chant. Short, thus generalized, thus easy to remember. Things that are easy to remember stick with you long past the point that you think you've forgotten them. The chant itself? Maybe. The idea behind the chant? Not until the day you die. You may forget where the idea came from, but the idea is still there. And surely that means the idea came from you, right? And ideas that come from you are rarely ever challenged by you. But I digress. > [!warning]- TW > Once again I'll be talking about current US politics. This time, explicitly. I've been thinking about a few different things lately and some of them feel a little nonsensical. One of the best examples I've heard recently goes something like this: - "The GOP's abortion ban is an attempt to control women's bodies." and, when asked why they would want this: - "They lack this control in their own lives and need to exert it somehow." This, I think, conflates a few points for the sake of simplicity. Again, simplicity is powerful because it spreads ideas quickly. It's a great tool for making ideas portable, and I think that, at least to some degree, this has truth to it. These statements are *accurate enough for now* while still being memorable. That said.. There's a difference between a leader of a group and the everyman of the same group. Cynically, the leader of a group doesn't need to believe everything they say. Their job is to lead the group in the direction they want to go, not to be a truth-teller. The everyman of the group, in contrast, needs to believe in the leader. Whether that's trust, fear, cold calculation, or something else, people don't follow a leader they can't even pretend to believe in. To bring this back to the GOP/abortion thing and put it simply: if you drew a Venn Diagram of the people that support a ban on abortion, people that want to control women's bodies, and people that lack control over their lives and feel the need to control others, I think you'd find a relatively normal-looking diagram with three mostly-separate circles. Flattening the opposition - "the other" - into a single dimension helps people understand the point you're trying to make. The problem is that a lot of people are trying to make a lot of points right now, and largely we see **and remember** this one-dimensional caricature of the "the other". Obviously this is not a one-sided thing: the "woke left" is a popular phrase for a reason. Same with "snowflake". Now we have "Russian troll" or "Tankie" to dismiss someone off-hand for stating outlandish things. All memorable phrases that turn a complex idea into a solid single-dimensional point. Like a sharp blade. I'll try something. When confronted by someone on your position in a debate, it's safer to hide behind a mask of complication and nuance. It's easier to tell people that you're pro-life and that it's because of deeply-held religious beliefs. Or that you're concerned about the morality and ethics of potentially killing a living being. When, in reality, you didn't think about it that hard and you don't need to. You listen to your leader and your leader says that today's *bad thing* is abortion. And, really, why should you care anyway? It's not something that affects you and you'd just prefer if everything went back to the way it was when life was great and everything was simple. Before women had any real say in things and trans people existed. This, however, is too much for regular conversation to a crowd or to someone who believes the same things you do. Not only is it inconvenient to think about a group of people like this, it's difficult to create and maintain this kind of image at all. It destroys the flow of conversation and any point that you'd want to make. You can't keep creating new tangents in your story. People will think you're nuts. When talking to *another person on the opposing side* the context changes. I think people forget this. We bring along our generalizations and assumptions built by our leaders and echo chambers and let that become our opinions of the other person. People are hard. Communication is hard. We don't need to make it harder by assuming a one-dimensional character on the receiving end of our words. Just remember that everyone is people too.