Quote:
Originally Posted by coberst
The early settlers had to learn the sign and behavior of the wolf and bear but it is the informal fallacy that today’s citizen must learn. When not recognized the manipulative sophistication of those who wish to control our society will cause us similar damage.
Those members of our early American settlers were required to understand many things about their natural habitation in order to survive. These early frontier settlers had primarily natural conditions that threatened their existence. They worried about and learned to understand the signs of the wolf and the bear also the clouds and the weather in general. Their survival depended upon it.
Today our well being, if not our very survival, depends upon our ability to understand the society we live in and the fellow citizens that occupy our space with us. Our needs for understanding our environment especially that part of it that contains fellow citizens has become acute because our fellows have become expert at manipulating our environment. If we do not understand how these things are being manipulated we are the losers.
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Ah, legend and folklore.
Can we stipulate that modern "Urban Legends" are just plain legends? It is we who are urban. The legends follow us, like a wolf in a suit.
Like Straw Men, legends are more and less real than artifices designed to deceive someone else, although to work the artifices must resonate with legends. But legends, more than artifices like, for example, advertising, must seem to have been experienced by someone just like us to work.
Recently my barber told me that a barber a few counties away, someone he had met and who had told him the story directly, had encountered a nest of spiders in cornrow hair. Discounting the absurdity of the idea that hair that doesn't conceal much of anything could somehow conceal spiders and fighting the shock of having stumbled upon a fossil of a legend, I explained that the spider-in-the-hair legend goes back to the first bouffant hairstyles of the Seventeenth (?) Century and had been attached to every new hairstyle since, particularly the ones that would mean less work for haircutters. He wasn't impressed, because the barber who had told him the story
had actually talked to the barber who had seen the spiders. Ah, reality. How elusive you can be.
So, that kind of psychological reality is much more effective because it fits into a space we already have inside our psyches. (That's why I always told my writing students they had to make their fiction more real than any non-fiction could ever be.)
Legends, good fiction, and Straw Men need to be self-realized.
--lemit
