bell notificationshomepageloginNewPostedit profile

Topic : Re: Convincing argument about something I don't agree with In my dystopian novel, Day, the son of a fascist dictator, is trying to convince Analise, a young genetic mutant oppressed under said fascist - selfpublishingguru.com

10% popularity

Have him appeal to history, not philosophy.

You’re approaching this problem from the wrong angle. You can’t have the two characters both make the same type of argument — an appeal to ethics/morality — because one of the arguments is inevitably going to be ‘better’ than the others, making the other one seem phony and strawman-like. In our real-life culture, there are very few instances where both sides effectively advance ethics-based arguments, and they usually arise from very specific and non-generalizable circumstances. (An example is the issue of abortion in the Western world.)

Instead, most issues in the world have a “principled” side, which tries to derive right-and-wrong from first principles and axioms, and a “pragmatic” side, which tries to derive right-and-wrong based on what happened in the past, and who benefited and suffered from it as a consequence. For a physics analogy, think of the Principalists as the theorists of public policy, and the Pragmatists as the experimentalists of public policy. Most people in both groups tend to think they are supremely right, and that the people in the other group are deluded idiots, so this is a great way to get two opposing characters with equally deep convictions.

Here are some examples from U.S. politics:

Gun control. Conservatives oppose it because they believe in a fundamental right to self-defense (principled view). Progressives support it because they look at the costs and historical consequences of such a policy — school shootings, domestic terrorism, etc. (pragmatic view).
Foreign wars. (Classical) Progressives oppose them because they view war and violence as fundamental evils, and that fighting fire with fire is a moral fallacy (principled view). (Classical) Conservatives support them because they look at the world and see many examples of bloody conflicts and human suffering that could have been prevented given early intervention (pragmatic view).
Planned economies. Progressives support them because they believe in economic equality and public stewardship of the commons (principled view). Conservatives oppose them because historically, they encourage corruption and depotism, to the extent that most people living under them flee their home countries (pragmatic view).
Affirmative action. Conservatives oppose it because they believe the rules of any system must be impartial, that artificially distorting them to favor certain participants over others undermines their legitimacy, and that hardcoding such offsets into policy amounts to collective punishment (principled view). Progressives assert that no real system exists in a vacuum, and argue that context-blind policies have historically failed to produce fair outcomes (pragmatic view).

While you may have specific and firm stances on each of these issues, reasonable people can be found on both sides of any one of them. If there weren’t, they wouldn’t be salient issues today — they would have been resolved a long time ago, and without much controversy.

So how does this apply to Day and Analise? Give them a historical context where Day has a plausible justification to believe the things that he does. This essentially becomes a worldbuilding problem.

that the dictatorship's laws allowing censorship of speech and press, imprisonment of genetically mutated humans, and rigid class structure are in place to keep the general population safe. Day says mutants are dangerous and subhuman, that too much freedom (i.e the ability to always speak your mind) is bad, and that his father's rule is benevolent.

The dictatorship had to start somehow, right? (And remember, most dictatorships come to power with broad popular support, otherwise they would never have been able to seize power.) So let’s say in the Time Before™, society had a “mutant problem”. Certain bad apples in the mutant population were doing Bad Things™, and because of their unique abilities, it had terrible consequences for their victims.

Because mutants were lower-class people in this society (because in your story, they are an oppressed group), most of their non-mutant victims were other poor people. Although mutants were not more likely to be criminals than the general population, the free press sensationalized “mutant terrorism” making it seem like a bigger problem than it was. This caused radical anti-mutant groups to appear among the working class, which fed into the cycle of violence.

The dictatorship established itself amidst the crisis, riding the wave of anti-mutant populism into power. However, even though the dictatorship is squarely anti-mutant, it is still a government which needs to enforce order and stability to continue existing. Having bands of radical vigilantes roving around is helpful in the short-term, but detrimental in the long-term. Remember that the number one threat to any dictator is not the opposition, but radicals within their own party. When the resistance fights the regime, it legitimatizes it. When the fanatics fight the regime, it undermines it. That’s why Franco sent the Blue Division away to fight the Soviets. That’s why Xi Jinping today is cracking down on Communist youth.

Since fanatics, by definition, are disagreeable to most of the population, you now have a dictatorship that can, sincerely, present itself as

a solution to the mutant problem,
an alternative to the fanatic anti-mutants,
a protector of the ordinary citizens, and
a keeper of the peace.

You could probably write a plausible character that subscribes to that.


Load Full (0)

Login to follow topic

More posts by @Lengel543

0 Comments

Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best

Back to top