*to Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Κυνόσαργες

Sunday 13 January 2013

Cognitive Assonance

There are things you should not read when living among the humans: anything which reinforces what you think is contemptible about them.

I made the mistake of first reading about 'Unit 731' at my desk as a JET among the droids in a Japanese junior high school and thought: "Yeah, they'd do it to me."

I read Orwell's 'Animal Farm' in elementary (I have older brothers) and '1984' in high school, and have never trusted humans in the face of authority since.  That is a fine thing.

And just recently, I have been reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'We' on the Tokyo train commute.  Much too close to home.  Think I need to start riding my bike to work again...


11 comments:

  1. I read 'The Rape of Nanking' here in Tokyo about 8 years ago and made the mistake of leaving it out so my girlfriend could find it. The first thing she said was 'If you think we're such shit, why don't you leave the country?'
    All that grief for just reading a book.

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    1. My own wife has that attitude. God Japan is insecure, and irrational. You could say 'the Japanese' are, except it is not an individual thing: the whole culture is insecure about any criticism. I have my issues with the US, as an example, but I can have a rational discussion with at least a quarter of Americans about what I think of the US, and they won't take it as a personal assault on themselves, nor will they think it means I hate EVERYTHING about all Americans. Similar one-quarter for Canadians; higher for some European countries, but not France...

      Japan, you can 'ware-ware Nihonjin' all you like, and look away all you want, that place you're circling is still called a 'drain'.

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  2. I haven't read either of those books, I ride a bike to work, so no commuting time, It's better that way. BTW I've tagged you in a meme, if you'd care to play along.

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  3. 'We' - the walls, the tunnels, it reminds me of someone who tells a story about escaping through the hedges, maybe in one of the chapters from Bradbury's 'The Machineries of Joy'.

    I remember getting drunk with JTEs in a pub somewhere up north. On TV, over the bar, there was something on Unit 731... the part where they were doing frostbite experiments. No one seemed to notice at the time. A kind of late in the evening broadcast, I guess. Two plus two was definitely more than four the next morning.

    PS
    We rode our bikes today. And kind of like it.

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    1. So you're not on the main islands, I take it. Japan got nailed from the Inland Sea through Tohoku.

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    2. The story I was trying to remember was E.M. Forster's 'The Other Side of the Hedge'. Having read Saint 5000's comment and your response, the dystopian reference sidetracked my memory. Blame it on the hedge. Hadn't gotten what the nightingale was a symbol of the first time round.

      Anyway...

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  4. I try to cushion my dystopian literature with something light; bubble gum for the mind if you will. Otherwise I end up wading knee deep on the internet depressing myself looking into things like human experimentation, conditioned response and mind control. :p Have you tried something more recent? Ally Condie has a trilogy out that may or may not interest you. Starts with the book Matched.

    Also my spell check is dumb, it doesn't know the word 'dystopian'.

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    1. "It doesn't know the word 'dystopian'."

      It's American English, right? Not dumb: 'Newspeak'...

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