(no subject)

[proximoception]

Resources are scarce, threats abound in the world, any trust can be betrayed, it is not obvious that these problems can be transcended. Do you:

1. Refuse to play.

2. Find a safe retreat by yourself, stockpile as many resources as possible, stay there ...
2a. ... while ignoring the outside world to avoid despair.
2b. ... while keeping an eye on it to diminish risk.

3. Stop caring what you do since none of it will matter ...
3a. ... by behaving randomly.
3b. ... by retreating into fantasy.
3c. ... by pursuing short term enjoyments while deliberately neglecting long term risk ...
3c1. ... such as sex or other bodily fulfillments.
3c2. ... such as violence.
3c3. ... such as novelty.
3c4. ... such as the fulfillment of some aesthetic self-conception.
3c5. ... such as the fulfillment of some aesthetic external project.

4. Survive no matter what, disregarding others' needs wherever it proves advantageous ...
4a. ... to survival.
4b. ... in any way.

5. Protect only blood relations since this bond is most certain and you care about these people the most, otherwise disregarding others' needs ...
5a. ... with a passive disregard (i.e. not significantly helping, but not proactively hurting).
5b. ... with an active disregard (i.e. taking, hurting, killing where this leads to advantage).

6. Protect all of those persons with whom you have a shared history of trust, otherwise disregarding others' needs ...
6a. ... with a passive disregard.
6b. ... with an active disregard.

7. Protect all persons that you have the power to.

In ambiguously zero-sum scenarios this is the basic spread of reactions. In themselves they're obvious enough to not be that interesting - how they shade into one another tends to be more so, or how they prove self-defeating. For the higher numbers utility vs. principle becomes a major source of interest, rivaled by how self-interest limits such efforts of protection.

Utility vs. principle is where most of the "idea" action is, since human failings are of dramatic interest but ultimately rather similar. Any attempt to maximize the good (whether for oneself, for some others, for all others) must define that good, so there's arguably something foundationally principled about any utilitarian project. Likewise no set of principles makes much sense unless aimed toward producing useful/desirable consequences. The two approaches meet at the root, somehow or other, but at last branch off, and their subsequent sub-branchings often end up in conflict. My metaphor isn't terrible: don't imagine sword-fighting twigs, but competitions for sunlight and rainfall.

Presumably converging as strategy, it's as tactics that goal-focused actions vary from rule-guided ones. Among other things they offer distinct ways to blind one into self-defeat: in pursuit of sub-goals you can forget or otherwise hurt your chances of reaching your overarching one, or you can fall into mistakes or confusion as new information comes up, due to the need for constant reassessment of sub-goals (whatever prepares for or joins up with the main one); while following rules of conduct you can lose sight of the reasons they were instituted, ending up allegiant to (possibly ill-thought out) sentences rather than to people or to a better future.

In ambiguously unending "total" zero sum situations each tactic can prove maddening: since it isn't clear what the "greatest good" at which one can aim will prove to be, assessment of the steps that would take one there founders, leaving one needing to pick out discrete, knowable goods from the flux (e.g. "always save nice people"). On the principle side, rules followed will frequently prove absurd because they're a structure unsupported by a floor - desirable states of affairs will slip right through them unless they're kept open to rewriting, an operation whose success will require the temporary abandonment of the suspect rules. Utility and principle that see themselves failing will pine for one another. As goals shift rules must, but since goals shift rules are a must, at least until either a sufficiently fine-tuned hierarchy of desired possible states or sufficiently elaborate and conditional set of rules are in place. Goals clear enough to work like rules, rules ramifying enough to not exclude any significant good.

This is words vs. world, or at any rate words vs. senses, hence post-structural territory, but continental post-structuralism is interested in either the purity of the paradox or in proving the unreality of both terms or the nihilizingly/negative-theologizingly total contingency of one of them. The post-structuralism narrative art has been interested in since at least the Greeks is of a different sort: not "all structures always fail" or "there are thus no structures" but "all these damn structures keep failing, why or how must we make the next one." Mostly books end with newly articulated rules paired with a refreshed sense of where the better strangenesses dwell within the worse. Sometimes the former are simply made felt while the latter are phrased, in fact. Ambiguity still exists, of course, not just in the sense that it's conveyed that the conclusion(s) reached may be wrong, but usually with the persistence of several rival perspectives past the end of the text, often embodied in characters or aspects of them. One (or some) tend to be favored though; Chekhov's claim that literature might only ask questions is accurate enough, but for any momentous question to even be coherently formulated a vast number of answers need to have first been reached.

"Where was I going with this" check: why The Walking Dead is suddenly better.

It is better because it has exhausted the uncomplex forms of zombie apocalypse survival and long since exhausted critical (and its writers') interest in zombies per se, and since the show must go on it must address what potential there is in the premise. The consequences of different ethical tactics in the face of this category of threat are what's left - nearly pure philosophical problems, which form a truly odd couple with the fan service for gorehounds that makes the show most of its money. The show's finally found the writers who can exploit the premise without making it a bore or laughingstock.

These writers are cribbing a lot of their ideas from Coen and Nolan brothers movies, which are in turn informed by Cormac McCarthy, noir films and writers etc., but that's fine. They're still branching out and trying stuff - they have to, needing to fill 16 episodes a year without obvious repetition. While Breaking Bad's premise and m.o. were a bit different, there's enough common ground that it's recently become their model, in terms of season structure and using the primary "villains" as an overlapping series of foils for the shifting mental states of protagonists.

There is still no reason to watch this show if you don't. It starts simple, then becomes boring as hell, then is a directionless mess for a while before some islands of non-stupid excellence show up in season 4. Trustworthy writing basically just started happening. And it's ridiculously disgusting, and gets grosser as it goes, if anything: watching a new low in the season 5 premiere Julie and I independently realized the show had hit Hostel levels of gruesomeness, and that the rage we feel toward Eli Roth had been dodged here only because of our grwdual desensitization. You can't even excuse the show on ethical grounds, i.e. that because it's interested in ethical issues the vehicle through which they're presented should be forgiven, since Hostel pretty painstakingly frames itself around an anti-objectification argument. Well, maybe a little, given how severely ironic that argument is, and how clearly it was a pretext to film graphic acts of maiming and murder. I haven't seen Audition but the presence of Miike was clearly an attempt to highlight Hostel's place in a bizarre tradition of progressive-message body horror films. (No one bought this, at least eventually, which was kind of fun to witness.)

So yeah, not worth it. Best I can say is that if for some reason you were watching the show you now have the improved luck of watching a decent one. Within its limits, anyway - the same restrictions that have pushed it into being actually interesting in its ethical speculations, or anyway about the psychology of ethics, keep it arid in most other departments. One other good development, though, is the belated realization that where frewuent violence has sharply diminishing returns even when presented with variety menace does not. With menace direction is all, or nearly all, so show's been investing in direction - not just art direction, which has been mostly (and meaninglessly) excellent all through.

The Game of Thrones premise is less urgent because of the excluded middle: you don't have to be one of the bad people or implicated non-bad ones, in its world. There's a zombie-ish menace that's supposed to eventually descend, but it keeps not quite doing it. The fact that it doesn't have to keep telling the same kind of story has thus ironically hurt it - as, probably, has the sex, since of the millions of people who won't tune in for mindless violence many will for that. Without the need to be good, no expensive show will be good, is how this can be phrased cynically. The recent twinges of better-ness in that show, I've theorized, come from the t.v. writers - the people smart enough to successfully damage-control, even gild, the series' more embarrassingly id-based elements are people smart enough to want something more out of their job. But there's no essential pressure toward complex interest there, just a wistful one, so my expectations aren't high.