In The Gang, I said that Un-Men penetrating the gang's undersea HQ was like UNCLE agents penetrating Thrush Central. In The Final Affair, they do. But this highlights a motivational contrast between Thrush and the gang. Thrush wants to unite the world in order to rule it whereas the gang wants to overthrow a UN world government in order to restore all the old divisions. In fact, the gang is such a discordant alliance that it is questionable whether it can even exist.
Fictional villains are united in their villainy but not in their reasons for it. In fact, during the twentieth century, the villains of popular fiction changed as international conflicts progressed from the Great War onwards.
14 comments:
People with no ultimate affinity make alliances as they further their interests at the time -- the USSR made pacts with Hitler, and then with the Western countries when they and him had their little falling-out, for instance.
In writing, the most important thing about a villain's motivations (unless they're some Unfathomable Otherness, which happens in SF and fantasy) is that they be comprehensible -- not just because that's their role in the plot.
In "The Peshawar Lancers", for example, Count Ignatieff notes that the Tsar's motivations aren't exactly the same as those of the Priesthood of the Black God. His ruler's desires are much more humanly comprehensible.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
One correction, I think it was YASMIN who discussed how the Tsar's hopes and motivations were not quite the same as those of the priests of the Peacock Angel. However loudly the Tsar might pray to the Black God in public, he did not truly wish the end of all life on Earth. Rather, the Tsar wanted to leave a heritage for his sons and grandsons.
It was Count Igatieff, a truly devout worshiper of Satan, who fully shared the life hating aspirations of the House of the Fallen.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I think you should also keep in mind how DISSATISFIED Poul Anderson eventually came to feel for the Psychotechnic stories. He eventually came to have only contempt for the United Nations. And I think he would strongly sympathize for those Britons who want the UK to leave the European Union. For reasons similar to why Anderson came to despise the UN.
Sean
The trouble with putting your faith in institutions is that people who do that tend to imagine them as run by themselves, or people like/sympathetic to/in agreement with themselves.
it's more enlightening to imagine them run by the people you most hate and fear.
Well, that is one way of putting it!
I do not feel quite like that about certain institutions that I am associated with.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I'm inclined to agree with you, at least about some institutions! I have only disdain for the people who run the UN or EU, for example. And I have similar views about the people who run or dominate the Democrat party in the US.
Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Or at least, one should ask, “What if it ends up being run by the people I most hate and fear?”
One issue is that institutions can change over time, sometimes as the result of their own successes. An institution started by idealists can become infested by careerists who are there for the well-paid, prestigious jobs, or by idealists of a different sort who see taking over an existing institution as a way to advance their own agenda.
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen
Kaor, Nicholas!
I agree, with one emendation: I would far rather have institutions taken over by careerists than by "idealists" who happened to be fanatical ideologues. The former does far less harm than the latter.
Regards! Sean
Kaor, Sean!
On this point, we have very little to disagree about. Proponents of evil ideals, or originally well-intentioned folk who refuse to pay attention to evidence that their program isn’t working as intended, can do more harm than the merely greedy and ambitious.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
Thanks! Robespierre and his Jacobins, Lenin and his Bolsheviks, etc., have done far more harm than the bureaucratic careerists they displaced!
Incidentally, we see some interesting comments by Anderson about bureaucrats in THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS, because one of the immortals in that story began as a Roman civil servant.
Sean
Also, you have to factor in the fact that -all- human beings have agendas and agency.
Hence the phenomenon of "regulatory capture".
If you set up an institution to regulate, say, Industry X, the people in charge of Industry X immediately have a very strong incentive to penetrate and influence -- "capture" the institution; and the nature of its work brings the people running the regulatory institution into contact with the people they regulate.
Human beings being what they are, this leads not just to bribery, logrolling, nepotism and lobbying (though it does lead to all those things, as night follows day) but to a gradual interpenetration of personnel, and along with that ideas, worldviews and conceptions.
Eventually the two institutions merge into one oozing, tentacled "THING".
The supposedly "regulated" then use the regulators for their own purposes -- one of the most common is to rig the system to impose unbearable costs on new entrants/potential competitors.
Thinking that this can somehow -not- happen is a failure of imagination -- in particular, of imagining that other people are or could be the passive subjects of your will, rather than beings with wills of their own.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, and we see that happening in Anderson's novel MIRKHEIM. And it will inevitably happen in a far more POISONOUS form in any socialist scheme as well. No, my view is that of Anderson, gov't and its inevitable regulation works best when it is as light and moderate as possible. Basically laws against theft, fraud, embezzlement, extortion, violence, etc.
People with AGENDAS never seem to imagine they could be OPPOSED.
Sean
In the British Labor Party, the Right and the Left each think that they can eradicate the other. They need to form two Parties.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, better for the warring factions in the UK Labour Party to go their separate ways.
The Conservative Party has somewhat similar problems, between those who EMPHATICALLY WANT the UK to leave the EU and those who, de facto, do not.
Sean
Post a Comment