2.1 KiB
[Challenge Companion] Conversion
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/9grel6/challenge_companion_conversion/
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Score: 18
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Created: 2018-09-18T03:49:51
Post:
tl;dr: this is the companion thread to the biweekly challenge, post ideas, recommendations, commentary, et cetera here.
I was watching the new Jack Ryan series a few weeks ago, and they place a lot of emphasis on the villain, who is an Islamic terrorist. I think they were trying their best to give him some justification for his actions and depth as a character, which they mostly succeeded at ... except that his conversion from being Westernized to being a radical. All of that is almost completely glossed over, in favor of showing you the emotional impetus for it (e.g. how he's treated by Western society).
Naturally if you're talking about conversion to an undesired ideology, it might be dangerous to show that on-screen or on the page, since you would have to present actual arguments, and if those were the most persuasive arguments that you could find, you might worry that you would convert someone by steelmanning the opposition. There are a lot of things you can do to undercut that persuasion, but there's a long history of people misinterpreting fictional characters that are intended to be takedowns of various ideologies (or just bad guys in general).
On the other hand, if you're showing a conversion to a favored ideology, then you really run the risk of looking like you're attempting to convert the reader, which most readers aren't terribly keen on, even if they're already of the preferred ideology.
(I think that if I were writing a story for this prompt, it would be about a "bad faith" conversion, one where someone learns the words and rituals for some reason other than true belief, which might offer a way to focus on doublethink and how we can become the thing we pretend to be.)
I've been dropping the ball on posting the challenge in a timely manner a little too often. Sorry.