The Mythcreant Podcast 556 – Societies That Ban Things
We’ve all been there: The plot is going well, but your hero is solving problems too easily because of their cool magic powers. Couldn’t you fix it by making their society ban cool magic powers? Technically, yes, but there’s a lot that goes into such a decision. Why would they ban something as useful as magic? For that matter, why would everyone be organized into factions based on their birthstone? As you may have guessed, we have some thoughts.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Aiden. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening theme]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I am Chris…
Oren: And I’mOren.
Chris: This is a secret podcast because we live in a culture where vocalizing is forbidden.
Oren: Ooh, so scandalous.
Chris: It goes back to the great singing wars, where two kings got in a big fight over who had a better voice. So, to prevent that from ever happening again, everyone decided: no talking. But we’re very brave rebels, because we think that we should be able to talk and it makes us outcasts and we’re hunted.
Oren: It’s also somehow… we’re actually very good at it, despite supposedly being in a culture where no one ever talks. Don’t worry about that part.
Chris: We had this awakening a couple of years ago where we discovered talking for the first time and it was very profound.
Oren: But, we decided to invent English. So, honestly, maybe we are the bad guys.
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: You had a blank canvas of infinite choices and you decided a language that spells “GHT” to be either silent or an “F” sound. Why are you like this?
Chris: [laughter] It is funny that there was a period in time when the first English dictionaries were being created, where some people writing things down made some very arbitrary decisions about how they wanted to spell things, sometimes just to match other words that were also spelled very strangely, and that’s it! Standardised spelling is only a couple of hundred years old.
Oren: And that’s how we got to where we are today. Personally, I know that if I was going to make an unrealistic world where things are forbidden, what I would do is I would have one faction that just won’t shut up about free speech and just screams about it, and every time someone mildly criticizes them they scream about free speech and then when they’re in power they immediately start trying to ban peoples’ speech. If I wanted it to be really unbelievable, I would do that, is what I’m saying.
Chris: Oh, no! Oren, too real!
Oren: That’s just an unrealistic fictional expectation, Chris. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Chris: I mean, I do think there’s a fun conversation (and sometimes not fun conversation) to be had here about which things are realistic for culture to forbid and which things are not.
Oren: What it comes down to is, you have to think about who is trying to forbid this and why. That’s what it comes down to and people try to forbid things all the time and there are various reasons they might do that. Sometimes, these are good reasons, like the taboo against teachers dating their students: this is a good thing to have. Some authors don’t understand that some taboos are a good thing to have and they think that if it’s cool and rebellious to break taboos against interracial dating, it must be cool and rebellious to break student-teacher dating taboos and it’s like no, that taboo exists for a reason; it’s because that is an inherently unequal relationship. Also, often it’s just they want to control people. You ban stuff that you don’t want people doing. That can be a good motivation, it’s just a question of who has a vested interest in doing this, right? Like banning talking is extremely unlikely just because it would be unworkable and would almost certainly fail, even if someone tried.
Chris: The other thing about why would somebody do this, again is the unworkability. Some things are just too burdensome. You could have tyrants, but people do have to choose to obey. And if everybody is universally unwilling to obey because it’s just too much, then it’s not going to work out. Like Prohibition in the United States: that wasn’t the most unreasonable law. We’re learning more and more that even a tiny bit of alcohol is bad for you and apparently, before Prohibition, the thing that people don’t realise is that we drank a lot more. It actually did something good in that it reduced how much people drank. But, at the same time, it was completely unworkable because nobody was willing to actually follow it.
Oren: And of course, it caused a huge spike in organised crime; to some extent it invented organised crime. Prohibition is complicated and the idea of it just being this silly idea that nobody liked and then that we got rid of after a few years is overly simplistic. But it is a good example of how there are things that are just too ingrained, too successfully bad. At least in some cultures, right? It’s culturally different. There are cultures that have largely abandoned alcohol, it’s just not ours.
Chris: [laughter] And again, maybe it comes down to how much people drank before Prohibition: a ridiculous amount. Some other things that are just unworkable, that are still things that fiction likes to feature is forbidding emotion, or love, or – and we talk about this all of the time – magic.
Oren: Yeah, I’d love to ban magic. That’s just a thing everyone does, because you need your hero to be mistreated for something cool and awesome and not a boring sad reason that people actually get mistreated.
Chris: Don’t get me wrong, if you actually wanted to make banning magic to be something that could happen and you only have cosmic horror magic that always lashes back and does terrible things, or if you quit gains, that could be plausible. But, most magic that people have, it’s not what people want. They have their cool, pressed mages.
Oren: And you can come up with narrower circumstances. There are situations in which certain kinds of magic might be banned. Of course, often what authors will do is they will set up very good reasons for that magic to be banned and then be like, “oh, but it’s wrong to ban that magic.” Is it though? You made a pretty compelling case for it earlier. You an also have situations where it’s roughly parallel to the modern attempt to ban renewable energy, where there is a very entrenched group of powerful people who rely on one kind of magic and they see another kind of magic as a threat. They might try to ban that; that could happen.
Chris: Definitely one group banning things from another group or something to protect their interests, that is very realistic. Again, as long as it’s not at the unworkable level; it’s what many stories want.
Oren: Even in those situations where there is one group doing it for their own interests, very often, if the thing they’re trying to ban is useful, they will still find ways to use it. There was this infamous scene from the show Landman where this guy just spouts a bunch of oil industry propaganda for five minutes. He does make one point that is true, which is the oil industry doesn’t have any problem using wind turbines when it is practical for them to use turbines to get oil out of the ground. They just don’t want you using wind turbines to power your house, because they want you to keep buying their oil.
Chris: Some examples of things that have actually been forbidden: dancing is something that has been forbidden in some cultures. River dancing, an Irish form of dancing, comes from dancing being banned and them dancing covertly. Sometimes, forbidding dancing is religious: dancing is too enjoyable and it leads to sin. If there is an oppressed group, their oppressors will do all sorts of things to reduce their morale, and banning dancing is one of their ways of trying to reduce enjoyment. So, that’s where that comes from. Banning any kind of weapons; banning martial arts; banning specific cultural practices, especially if we’re trying to compel the culture to assimilate, or adopt a new religion. Mingling and marriage between two different groups: that’s a popular one. Sometimes goods are rationed, particularly in times of war. And of course, we have things like immigration.
Oren: Trying to keep out people who are not part of your in-group is a pretty universal experience with predictably tragic results for everybody. My favourite – and I think you could also do something like this with magic – is when countries get together and agree to ban certain weapons. They almost never do this with weapons they still use.
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: Like, flamethrowers are kind of illegal under international law and a big part of the reason is that they have really bad press, but also, we have bombs and missiles that do the same thing from further away. So, we don’t really need flamethrowers anymore. So, they’re an easy one to check of your list to improve your image.
Chris: One of the funny ones that we do see a lot in Star Trek is the Prime Directive, which is very strange, because it’s based on outdated ideas of ethics and it’s basically there again to create weird plot complications: “Oh, no! It’s forbidden for us to stop Lesley from being murdered by weird planet that murders people for stepping in their garden area.” No, we can’t save this civilization from this… there was a big volcano… there was an entire planet that has a natural disaster and literally everyone’s going to die and they decided to do a conflate of whether it was okay to save them.
Oren: Yeah, they’ve done that multiple times. The one that really draws attention is the episode “Pen Pals” when the planet is kind of going through mass earthquakes. That’s the one where they have their debate about whether it would be okay to intervene, and obviously the answer is yes. So, Picard is like, “what if it was a war?” And, it’s like, I don’t know Picard! Maybe if the situation was different we would do something different!
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: It’s the biggest non sequitur ever.
Chris: It’s especially funny, because usually the justification they use for the Prime Directive, which applies to species that don’t have war capabilities yet – and so they’re fairly isolated on their own planet – is that they should not interfere with their development and let that society develop on its own. But, if the entire society is going to die, I don’t see the value in not interfering. [laughter]
Oren: This whole idea is derived from two things: 1) it’s derived from a reaction against US military adventurism, which, fair enough: that was pretty awful. The war line is how Star Trek originally envisioned this, although hilariously, in their first Prime Directive episode – I don’t remember if they actually used the word “Prime Directive”, the episode is a private little war – they decide they are going to intervene and arm their side in this proxy war which is kind of funny in retrospect. But, it also comes from a reaction against this idea of, “well, we need to help who don’t have the same stuff we have so we’re going to help them by flooding their economy with consumer goods.” That often can have really bad consequences. They’ll get TVs for the first time, but their healthcare system will collapse. That sort of stuff can happen, but that’s complicated and hard to talk about in 45 minutes so what you end up with is these bizarre straw man situations where no serious ethicist would say, “yeah, you should probably let that species die in the name of noninterference.” [laughter]
Chris: [laughter] Another thing that I find interesting is that in the Star Trek world, the Federation band eugenics, which I do think is believable, but the reason that they ban eugenics seems very strange, which is, oh, there were some eugenics wars. Do you know what the details about these eugenics wars are?
Oren: I don’t find that especially unbelievable. This is really complicated because there’s a huge amount of real life ethics tied up in this question. Because, unlike a lot of Star Trek’s moral dilemmas, this one is actually based on stuff that we might be able to do soon. I should point out that pretty much all countries that I know of currently adhere to rules that ban you from altering the genes of unborn children, aside from some occasional circumstances to prevent really serious disease. That is a thing we do in real life. It’s not unbelievable to me that if you add a bunch of people who were genetically engineered to be better and then they try to take over, and that caused a bunch of problems that we would ban the technology for that reason.
Chris: Maybe part of the issue is that we don’t need a really elaborate backstory to explain why they banned eugenics. One reason for banning things is just sometimes, at a society level, something causes lots of problems even though theoretically, it could be done without harm. Definitely with eugenics, you could definitely see that there could have been irresponsible eugenics practices that ended up dong a lot of damage which just encourage them to ban it altogether.
Oren: We should specify what we’re talking about here, which is sci-fi gene editing, to give you essentially superpowers. Because, in real life, eugenics is a lot bigger than that.
Chris: In the context of Star Trek, it is just genetic modification. They call it eugenics, whereas in real life, you get into really creepy stuff.
Oren: In Stark Trek, I don’t know: that’s a really complicated one. It’s a little weird to me that in the Federation, you ban this practice because you think that’s it’s just too dangerous to be allowed. But it’s always struck me as odd that if it can do that, if it can give you that kind of superpowers, are there no other factions willing to do it? I don’t know. We see a lot of amoral factions in Star Trek. It’s also struck me as a little odd that the Federation, which is supposedly fairly moral , treats people who have been modified – without their consent, of course; this all happens when they’re babies – so badly and there doesn’t seem to be any serious pushback against that. That’s a little odd to me. I don’t know. The genetic engineering episodes are complicated and often end up being about something other than genetic engineering in the first place. So, it gets kind of hard to judge.
Chris: It is one of those things that it doesn’t feel like there’s necessarily a lot of thoughtful discussion on the issue in Star Trek.
Oren: I mean, their most recent attempt was kind of hamstrung by the fact that they can’t change it, because canonically it has to be in place for Deep Space 9 to happen. So, they had this weird episode where they argued about it for 45 minutes and then didn’t reach any conclusions. [laughter] What’s really funny in Star Trek is the occasional… in the original series they’ll do like, you’re forbidden to go to this planet. If you go there we’ll kill you. Oh, okay. Calm down!
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: The one that is always, of course, used to power all kinds of stories is characters who are banned from associating with each other. This is typically used in a romantic context, but not always. It’s one of those ones that can make sense, but you have to think about what it means and what you are saying with it. If you have people who are banned and you want it to be from two roughly equal sides, you know, you can do that. You can have feuding families or you could have nations that are very hostile to each other, you could have that sort of thing. But, other than that, its kind of hard to have this and be on an equal playing field. Again, if you have a setting where Jews and gentiles aren’t allowed to date, it’s not because Jews are held in high esteem.
Chris: It’s going to be a very loaded topic.
Oren: And I’ve seen this a few times in stories where they’ll have like, our two groups aren’t allowed to date. But, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of prejudice just between the groups. And it’s like, well the reason they’re not allowed to date is because of the prejudice between the groups, right?
Chris: It’s because the more powerful group doesn’t want their bloodlines, or whatever, to be tainted. It’s inherently extreme bigotry at work. Unless, again, there’s two factions who are just outright enemies. At a smaller scale, you could also have patriarchy, where we’re trying to control women and who they’re exposed to, to control what babies they might have. Usually, there’s a lot of oppression dynamics there, unless the two groups are just outright enemies.
Oren: As a default for an author who isn’t looking to make some really big, deep statement, I usually advise something that’s analogous to feuding families, that is just easier and it doesn’t require as much complicated justification. Especially during the YA dystopia boom, which has been over for a few years at this point. But, you’ve got some really weird ones.
Chris: Plus One.
Oren: The novel Plus One had the… society is split into the nightshift and the dayshift because of the 1918 flu pandemic? Sure…
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: You get the ones that are like, you’re divided up among your Myers Briggs personality test results.
Chris: Yeah: Divergent. Wherever anybody is in a different faction based on their personality trait, and how dare you have more than one personality trait! [laughter]
Oren: I’ve met some hiring managers who think that way. But, in general, that’s kind of silly. That really complicated, arbitrary factor: it’s at best going to take a lot of explaining. It’s usually easier to just be like, well these two characters are from families who hate each other. It worked for Romeo & Juliet, it’ll work for you.
Chris: With something like Plus One, it feels like that elaborate setup where there’s a day population and a night population and ‘ne’er the two shall meet’ was trying to create some novelty in the world. For me, I would prefer the novel to be created by something that feels plausible, but I cant say that it never helps a book to be successful to have something wild. Like with Divergent, one of the reasons why it was popular, even though so ridiculous, is everybody loves a little online personality test.
Oren: Stories where they ban the history are a really interesting one. Or, usually where they try to be like, no, this history doesn’t exist, right? This certain thing never happened.
Chris: Certainly plausible that someone would try.
Oren: And it does happen. In some cases, there are examples of governments that have just tried to pretend things never happened. That’s the famous photo of Stalin with all of his cronies, and each version has one fewer crony in it. That sort of thing, that does happen. It’s difficult; it requires a very high degree of control. It’s usually easier to subvert history and paint a narrative that is favourable to you than it is to outright ban it. Who knows where we’re going now? But, for most of the US’s history, it’s very rare that we just straight up pretend that something didn’t happen. What’s more often, is that we pretend it happened in a way that is more favourable to us. As long as the majority feels like that supports their interests, that works out okay. In a ln a lot of fantasy settings, that isn’t what writers want, because I guess they feel like that’s not big enough of a twist. So, you end up with something like Fourth Wing, where there’s this reveal that, oh, there’s actually a secret other group of enemies that we have to fight, and it’s forbidden to know about them for some reason. I didn’t read the sequel, so I don’t know what the explanation they gave there is. But I am extremely sceptical.
Chris: Sounds like those enemies aren’t that far away. If it’s history that there’s no living evidence for it walking around, and you don’t have mass communication in this setting, so we can just burn all the books and wait a number of generations… forbid people to talk about it: I feel like that works a lot better. Fourth Wing has, like, the enemies are there; you can go see them if you just fly in your dragon a little ways.
Oren: It also brings up the motivation question. Why would a militaristic government try to hide the existence of a bunch of inherently evil enemies who it is okay to kill? That’s exactly what they want. That’s perfect. Most governments have to make up one of those.
Chris: Now that we’re seeing all the effects of misinformation. I suppose if you had a cyberpunk dystopia, aka the real world –
Oren: [laughter]
Chris: – you could have a situation where a tyrannical government says, “no, that’s not real!” and there’s so much fabrication, it’s not that the information doesn’t exist, it’s that it’s really difficult to sort out what’s real from what’s not real. So, it might be treated like just another conspiracy theory.
Oren: At least from my understanding of conspiracy theories – and I’m a hobbyist – the conspiracy theories that have the greatest reach are the ones that subvert what really happened. Like, you do get some people who’s conspiracy theory is that Covid never happened. That is a thing that some people genuinely believe. The much more widespread Covid conspiracy theories are that it was a bioweapon from China, or that it existed but it wasn’t really that bad and that it was really the vaccines; that sort of thing. Those are the conspiracy theories that tend to stick better because people remember that Covid happened; it’s harder to tell them that it didn’t happen, because they remember it. But, it’s easier to convince them that, actually, these people you already don’t like were responsible. That’s a lot easier.
Chris: I do think that how distant something is in time really matters. Because, sometimes what happens is the storyteller just wants people to forget something that was only two generations ago. You know, your grandparent was alive then and could tell you. In some cases, it’s more plausible if you just make it a little further back in time, so it’s not in living memory and hasn’t been for several generations.
Oren: Well, I think with that, we are going to go ahead and ban any further discussion in this podcast. No more of that’s allowed.
Chris: If you want to support our brave efforts to talk, you can support us on patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And, before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. There’s Ayman Jaber: he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. There’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek; we’ll talk to you next week!
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