THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING

 A brief response on CHFB to the old question, "Are superheroes fascist if they practice altruism?"

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I generally agree with the "argument of altruism," but it's never stopped any critic who was determined to read a given text the way he wanted to,

One can even go further back to (I thnk) Socrates. I'm not looking it up, but I think he's the guy who argued that people feeling sorry for imaginary people was not the same as feeling sorry for real people. This was and is true, as far as it goes. But you can also argue that even the most exalted novel or play is still about "imaginary people" and could be considered a distraction from "real life." 

We humans don't tell imaginary stories about imaginary people primarily to talk real people into doing real things, good or bad, even though individual humans can use stories for this purpose. We tell stories because we have to. Every single day of every human being's life, his or her brain is filled with questions of, "what if I do this? What if someone else does something else?" 

With all that ceaseless activity-- how could we NOT tell stories of things that we imagine happening to imaginary people? Stories with happy endings, sad endings, absurd endings. It's foolish to think one could ever get rid of one kind of story, a story one may not like, and keep all the others. They're all tied to our nature, and they only go away when we all go away. 

(Sorry, I'm channeling SANDMAN today...)