Defeating the Villain

Just want to say I find your writing style very pleasant and easy to read.

Tolkien did offer a glimpse into a more realistic take on his story:

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. in that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

I think for the most part the LW-sphere's attempts to make life like a high fantasy novel in this respect do so by targeting an extremely abstract thing as a villain, such as "death itself". In this case, it's only a metaphor intended for motivation, because humans really like "defeating the villain", and the actual thing being attempted is building, much more than it is destroying - the reasons why defeating an actual literal villain is usually not finishing the job and might actually make things worse don't really apply, although that doesn't necessarily rule out that the effort to "defeat death" might have negative consequences, such as those /u/chaosmage has detailed.

I think a good example of defeating the villain and not actually making things better can be seen in many of the Arab Spring revolutions, especially Egypt. It was the most stable country in the Middle East for decades, though it was ruled by a dictator. Egypt got rid of Mubarak, but the movement that did it had no kind of coherent plan for how they were going to create a stable democracy afterward. And now Egypt is a decidedly worse place to live than when Mubarak was in charge.

Defeating the villain is rarely enough. Building is harder than destroying, and it is very unlikely that something good will spontaneously fill the void when something evil is taken away. It is also insufficient to speak in vague generalities about the ideals to which the post-[whatever] society will adhere. How are you going to avoid the problems caused by whatever you are eliminating, and how are you going to successfully transition from evil to good?

In fantasy novels, this is rarely an issue.

Two exceptions: Orwell's Animal Farm, which was explicitly an allegory for the Russian Revolution, and Brian Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, in which defeating the Evil Overlord turns out to have been only the beginning of the heroes' troubles...

Aragorn can hardly be worse than Sauron.

Aragorn was totally worse than Sauron, unless you value orc lives as negative (they certainly didn't). It's mere addition.

One of the reasons is that a lot of LW members are really involved in FAI issues and they strongly believe that if they manage to succeed in building a "good" AI , most of earthly problems will be solved in an very short time, Bostrom said something like that we can postpone solving complicated philosophical issues after we solved AI ethics issue.

This "let's defeat the villain and everything will be OK" mentality is what made me skeptical of many aspects of liberalism. Many liberal-leaning activists choose a controversial topic (religion, gay marriage, abortion, immigration, etc.) and proclaim that the old system is evil, without a rational explanation why, and more importantly, without a rational explanation how their proposal would be better in the long term. If I ask for an explanation, I'm often labeled as "the enemy".

It's interesting, as I think that if liberalism were slower, I would likely be a liberal. If the liberal views were rationally discussed, and if serious research was being made to study the effects of these novel ideas on society after many generations, or if we just slowly introduced a few minor reforms first, and then observed how it affects the next generation, I would be among the very strong supporters of these liberal ideas.

Why I'm conservative-leaning? Because I hold the belief that while the proposals of liberals might bring the advantage of some personal freedoms, 1. these would be relative, so people would not feel happier and 2. they could have long-lasting negative side-effects of the society as a whole.

Why wasn't I convinced by these ideas? Because they are used as ammunition, as things which "sound good". The weight is not on scientific rigor, but about how nice the idea sounds to potential voters.

A (maybe a little extreme) example: A school wants to introduce the rule that teachers are not allowed to correct student's essays with a red pen, because red is an aggressive color, it is abusive and it causes psychological trauma for the children. Or that they intentionally forbid children to call each other boys and girls, or even to forbid them the knowledge that any difference exists, just to erode the difference between genders, so that everyone should choose a gender later and not be "biased". These seem to be suggested because they "sound good" for a liberal activist, but as I grew up while my essays were corrected with a red pen, and all other people I know grew up that way, and countless generations grew up that way, and none of us seem to have any psychological trauma because of this, I would oppose any such "novel ideas", unless there was a serious study observing the long-lasting effects proving me wrong.

I know the evidence for some of my beliefs is mostly anecdotic, but even anecdotic evidence is better than no evidence at all.

I wonder what happens if I follow this to what I viscerally feel to be a supervillain: Death itself.

Maybe Death is like Gaddafi. It is very bad, but gives a semblance of order, and removing that might not make living in its former domain any better immediately. It is hard to even make a guess at the probability of this, given that we don't know what defeating Death would mean or even look like, but we can try to build scenarios and select among post-villain worlds before its removal, in the same way that we and the Libyans would wish had been done in the Gaddafi case.

Do we want to retain Death as an option? Or should immortality, once accepted, be compulsory? Fictional immortalities tend to not be absolute: if you wanted to kill yourself, you could still jump into a black hole or something. But suppose those aren't possible, and a more modest type of durability can be rounded up into immortality by some cognitive modifications that create extreme aversion to bodily harm. Even if those didn't necessarily come with durability, people in love could still blackmail each other into accepting such modifications, and spend billions of years living a life that isn't actually a choice, sort of like in Friendship is Optimal.

Then there are the innumerable ways immortality could be worse than death - many of these have already been explored in fiction. Maybe you permanently lose 1% of your capacity for reason and happiness every 50 years, and unlike Death that isn't fixable - or whatever.

But even if both of these were averted and immortality was otherwise perfect for the immortal individual, it might still be a bad thing for humanity or life. If it is not available to everyone - because it is too expensive, classified as Top Secret military technology or only works on people with certain inalienable features like particular chromosomes or a Wizard Gene - that gives a whole new level to societal inequality. Death used to be the great equalizer - remove it and the rich (or Wizard Gene holders or whatever) become so dissimilar from mortals as to be practically a seperate species. And the only comparative advantage mortals retain is the ability to do suicide attacks. That kind of scenario can go wrong in all sorts of ways. It can still be a net gain for a select group of individuals - like getting rid of Gaddafi was a net gain for the people in his prisons - while a net loss for a larger number of other individuals.

You could construct even weirder scenarios, where immortalizing one individual removes one distant and probably lifeless galaxy, but I find it too hard to suspend my disbelief about such scenarios for them to help me think.

So how would removing Death lead to a certainly improved universe? I think that at a minimum, it'd have to be available to every human, retain Death as an option and not have side-effects that could ever escalate into fates worse than Death. That's a much, much taller order than "just invent uploading and declare victory" and might be a hopeless endeavor even if uploading is possible.

After going through these imaginations with something I viscerally feel to be a villain, I can kind of understand the impulse to just remove Gaddafi and hope for the best, rather than plan (and take responsibility) for what happens after.

Thank you for this. This article brought me to join this community, because it was wisdom that I could easily absorb.

Wait a bit please. I am under the impression the defeating the villain worked very well for Western Europe after WW2? Or maybe that is the issue, that that kind of historical experience generated this kind of generalization even in situations where it doesn't apply?

It should not be too hard to make heuristics for it. The more power is concentrated into a few hands the more likely defeating them will change something. You can defeat a few big villains, many small ones not.

Sauron wasn't actually dead at the end of Lord of the Rings, he just permanently lost all his power. So what's to prevent him from coming back? Sure, he has no physical abilities, but I'm pretty sure that Adolf Hitler, for instance, didn't get as far as he got based on his physical strength.