When you were a child there’s a good chance someone sat you on their knee and told you a story. Maybe this was your parents, maybe it was a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a grandfather or grandmother, or even a babysitter. The story you were told had a not-so-subtle lesson couched within. Maybe it was a tale about an ogre who eats children who lie, maybe it was fable about little girls who get gobbled up by wolves when they talk to strangers, or maybe it was a story about a brother and sister who worked together to kill a witch who wanted to eat them. Whatever the story, we all heard them growing up. Storytelling is part of the human condition, but its function is not only entertainment, it’s not even primarily entertainment. Storytelling has always been first and foremost formation.

Since time immemorial human beings have understood instinctively that we are more likely to remember the lessons we learn in stories. We also know — though we don’t know how, exactly — that we’re more likely to remember the stories that move us or that make us laugh. A good storyteller does both, sometimes at the same time. For the religious readers out there, you know well that preachers and priests do their best work when they put their Sunday lessons in stories. And parents who want to teach their children complex moral lessons know to do so by telling it to them in a story. No one has to tell us to do these things. We do it automatically.

Storytelling only becomes more sophisticated as the centuries march on. We don’t just tell stories around the hearth anymore, now we also write them down with beautiful prose and rich illustrations. We don’t just write them down, we also perform them on stages with costumes and music! We don’t just perform them on stage, now we can record them and watch the performances in our living rooms, and it all looks so real! Yet, every time a child sits on his mother’s lap, she will instinctively find herself telling him a story. When we get together with our friends, we all rifle through our week in search of a story to relate. Storytelling is arguably the most important and universal feature of humanity.

So much time has passed from those days when all we had were our spoken tales shared around the campfire that we’ve begun to forget the original purpose of storytelling. We’ve begun to forget that stories and, to use the modern parlance, media are formation. Every story we take in, in whatever medium, is forming us. Some formation is good, some is neutral, some is downright horrific.

There are two major ways that fiction — books, movies, video games, television, etc — impact, alter, form, and manipulate your mind:

• First, fiction presents to you an image of reality which you will then use to construct your perception of the real world.

• Second, fiction can subtly change you over time. This includes changing your opinions, your behavior, your tastes, your beliefs, and sometimes even your personality

And yes, even though a lot of what we picture when we hear the word “formation” is generally about children, adults are just as susceptible to alteration and formation as children. Not to speak of the fact that our modern society is becoming increasingly immature… We are all susceptible to the formation that is promised in stories. This is actually a perfectly neutral state of affairs. If a book has no possibility of changing us in some way then what’s the point of reading it? Not all change is bad, just as not all formation is good. In the video I examined at length the various ways fictional media can change and form us, both for the better and for the worse.

Let’s get this out of the way first:

Do Video Games Cause Violence?

(No, obviously, but here are some resources in case you aren’t convinced)

• In 2015 the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Violent Media presented its findings that violent video games could be linked to aggression but (they later clarified) not to violent crime. This in-depth examination of that task force’s findings published in 2020 has uncovered a number of factors that call the 2015 data into question. This is a hugely unbiased analysis which refuses to present absolute conclusions but which also refuses to accept conclusions which had been reached through invalid or questionable means. For anyone who genuinely believes that video games cause violence, this is a good place to start, as it demonstrates just how shaky the foundations of that belief really are.

• A point: around the same time violent video games (and movies) fell under scrutiny the “mass media” was becoming more salaciously violent than ever before in American history. Even news reels about the WWII were less violent than a simple sixty-second segment about some guy killing his coworker and then himself in Small Town Nowhere. More than that, the average person’s daily viewing of this salaciously violent media was also hitting new highs. Most people turned on the TV as soon as they woke up, most offices had TVs in the break rooms. Most kids turned on the TV as soon as they got home from school. Most families watched TV through dinner and then after dinner and then until bed, and then sometimes while in bed until they fell asleep. And “if it bleeds, it leads” so anything violent was played on repeat on all the news channels.
  My point is that around this time people were taking in a shocking amount of real life violence. THIS more than any number of violent video games and violent movies was contributing volumes to the desensitization of people, but especially of children and youths.

• This 2007 article on the topic asks simple questions about the validity of the link between video games and real life aggression while also touching on a connected issue: why do all these histrionic video game condemners who insist that video games must have negative effects refuse to also look at the data regarding their positive effects?

  “[I]s it possible that a behavior with such a high base rate (i.e. video game playing) is useful in explaining a behavior with a very low base rate (i.e. school shootings)? Put another way, can an almost universal behavior truly predict a rare behavior?”

• This 2019 study from England conducted on just over a thousand British adolescents found no conclusive link between the playing of violent video games and increases in aggressive behavior. Moreover, this study very helpfully explains the main basis for older studies’ assumption that this was the case, that is, results derived from the general aggression model or GAM. Using this in the way in which it was used was inherently flawed to start with. And the authors explain why before presenting the results of their own own study.

• Another meta-analysis from 2020 which again found countless issues with previous analyses and also found no conclusive evidence that there was any link between video games and aggression.

  “Overall, longitudinal studies do not appear to support substantive long-term links between aggressive game content and youth aggression. Correlations between aggressive game content and youth aggression appear better explained by methodological weaknesses and researcher expectancy effects than true effects in the real world.”

Alright, enough about that.

I. Fiction and Reality

Of course you do. All reasonable adults and most reasonable children know the difference between fiction and reality. And that knowledge does change how certain media impacts our minds — such as with violent images — but beyond that, it just isn’t that simple. You can know that something is fiction, hell, it can be a cartoon and it will still have an impact of some kind on your mind. Here’s how:

I.a. Real Versus Fake (How the Perceived Realism of Fictional Violence Alters the Effects It Has on the Viewer’s Mind)

Closely related to the video game topic is this one. A big reason video game violence doesn’t increase aggression in its players is because the players do not perceive that violence to be real. It really is (more or less) that simple.

The biggest issue with a lot research on the question of violent media leading to violence in real life is that the researchers use merely “violent media” on their test subjects, very often failing to differentiate between fictional violent media and real violent media. I will absolutely concede that real life violent images and news can lead to desensitization, decreases in empathy, and even some degree of heightened aggression, almost as a trauma response to helplessly watching something horrific actually happen.

More important than that, I would say, is the salacious and glamorizing sheen that the media puts on real life violence. For instance, numerous serial killers and even school shooters have expressed that a major contributing factor to their decision to carry out violent acts was that they wanted to be famous or be on TV. I have very little patience or tolerance for any academic study on this topic that fails to acknowledge a clear distinction between real life violence and fictional violence.

The oft-overlooked reality is that there is a mental distinction that our brains make between real life violence and fictional violence. This has to do with “real” violence being metabolized by our mind as an example of actual reality. Overlooking this distinction causes us, as a society, to assume that general “violence” is the culprit, while overlooking the much larger and much more dangerous issue: the news media’s glorification of real-world violent behavior.

In addition, later (more reliable) studies on the topic took into consideration the subjects’ pre-existing personality traits. People who self-reported as more aggressive in general would be more likely to have aggressive reactions to violent media. At least one of the studies I’ve listed below pointed out that little boys are generally more aggressive (not more violent, but more prone to aggressive solutions to problems) than girls, which was reflected in the study’s results.

(By the way, a lot of data out there debunking the links between video games and fictional violence and real life violence often comes with the name Christopher J. Ferguson. Dr. Ferguson is a psychologist who is a professor and co-chair of psychology at Stetson University in Florida. He has also been a professor of criminal justice at Texas A&M. This guy is out there on the front lines trying to undo decades of damage caused by this absurd fallacy. Here’s a link to his academic page on his personal website where he has a lot of interesting stuff archived.)

• This meta-analysis from the 2009 Journal of Pediatrics, which analyzed dozens of peer-reviewed studies, found major issues with the ways in which those studies were conducted which resulted in wildly misleading data:

  “Publication bias was a problem for studies of aggressive behavior, and methodological problems such as the use of poor aggression measures inflated effect size. Once corrected for publication bias, studies of media violence effects provided little support for the hypothesis that media violence is associated with higher aggression. The corrected overall effect size for all studies was r = .08.”

• This important 1974 study — sometimes called a landmark study — describes the result of a fascinating experiment done on elementary school children that measured aggressive behavior in relation to the realism of the violent media they had watched.

  “The aggressive cartoons, however, failed to disinhibit aggressive behavior in either the boys or the girls. These results lend support to previous research reported by Hapkiewicz & Roden1 and Siegel2 who used interpersonal aggression as a criterion measure, and by Osborne and Endsley3 who found the emotional impact of cartoon violence (measured by galvanic skin response) to be much less than that which resulted from viewing violence among human characters.”

  • note: the above link leads to a free PDF of this study which, unfortunately, does not include the charts and graphs. This link might provide you access to the final printed version through an institution if such things are available to you.

• This study from 2013 details a similar experiment carried out on adults. Over two hundred college students were shown violent fictional tv shows and then they were shown deliberately similar violent clips of a real event. The clips they were shown were explicitly marked as fictional or real. After, they were assessed via questionnaire regarding their anxiety, empathy, and aggression state. (Alternative link.)

  “…our results indicate that people responded with more empathy when they knew they were seeing scenes of actual violence with real people being harmed compared with when they were watching fictional scenes. This is an important point, as it provides demonstration that human brains process information differently depending upon whether it is understood to be real or fictional.”

I.b. Is This Real Life? Or Is It Just Fantasy? (How people tend to use fiction to build their perception of the real world)

Okay, so the question of real versus fake is pretty easy to solve for most of us adults, but what about when we know something is fictional and yet we still use aspects of it to build up our baseline for reality?

• This is the 1992 article which I spoke about in the video which examined at length the ways in which the average human acquires data about reality. Specifically this one speaks about the plethora of “mediated” sources for reality to which we subject ourselves every day. Though its emphasis is more on the way virtual reality will, in the future, prove a challenge to our perception of the reality of reality (this article, remember, is thirty-four years old) this nevertheless provides a tremendous amount of eye-opening information about this thing we call Real Life.

  “First, judgments about the reality of mass media events, characters, including fictional characters, are natural, ongoing, probabalistic [sic] (not dichotomous), and relatively sophisticated. In addition, mediated events and people are most easily accepted as real when places and people appearing in stories are similar to or are the same as familiar places, contexts, and people. Also, when an event, if true, has immediate (rather than delayed) implications, the audience will act on a ‘worst-case’ scenario rather than on a careful analysis of all of the facts. Finally, fictional media presentations are most likely to be mistaken for reality when the audience feels stress, strain, or worry about the future.”

  • For anyone curious, the 2012 book by Dylan Trigg The Memory of Place, A Phenomenology of the Uncanny4 is a fascinating foray into the philosophy of how our perception of reality can be altered by various factors, including emotion. My personal copy of this book is one of the most heavily-annotated books on my shelves.

    “Above all, what is ‘weird’ is less a matter of content, and more a position we as human subjects adopt in relation to that content…”

• As I said in the video, “cultivation” is what researchers call it when a person’s mind — opinions, beliefs, behavior, etc — is altered by fiction. This 2009 study examined the possibility that perceived realism would have an effect on the linking of “television exposure and social judgments.”

  “Television influences one’s judgments about the real world. More than 30 years of research into television’s ability to cultivate5 6 or construct7 viewers’ social reality has demonstrated a moderate but reliable link between television exposure and some social judgments8 9 . Although the existence of this relationship is evident, the processes responsible for the relationship are little understood10 11 12.”

• This is the interesting article by Sue Cartwright which does an excellent job of contrasting the story of the Tongan castaways to the widespread influence of Lord of the Flies on our ideas about real humanity.

  Cartwright pointed out that the concept of Lord of the Flies has now become a model for a rash of reality programming in which real people “are plied with alcohol” and are externally motivated to behave in cruel, cheating, manipulative ways in order to get ahead. For a time this led to imitation and even influenced young people to believe that this behavior was both normal and expected.

  “This epic tale demonstrates just how much manipulation is required to bring out the worst in people and the effect this has on our collective consciousness.

  Lionel Trilling, an influential critic of the book said the novel marked a mutation in culture13 and despite this fact, in 1983, the author received a Nobel Prize in Literature for his parables of the human condition. In fact, he was so revered in literary circles he was knighted in 1988 and in 2008, The Times newspaper ranked him third on its list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” [emphasis in original]

  • Information about the incredible true story of the Tongan boys.

• For a laff, here’s the story about the woman who thought she could go to South Korea and scoop up a nice Kdrama boyfriend, only to be disappointed by the existence of reality.

I.c The Science of Propaganda (Some Studies About Effective Ways Media Can Be Used To Change Minds)

This is a massive topic and not quite the subject we’re discussing today. But if we remember that most or all fiction media is attempting to convince you of something (persuade you) and that persuasion — no matter the form, political, marketing, or social — is harnessing certain neurological and psychological factors, this becomes more relevant. Persuasion is used by storytellers all the time. It’s a neutral thing. Writers want to convince you to care about their characters, or persuade you to turn the page or get emotionally invested in the story. More insidious actors might use these principles within storytelling to change your mind about certain moral, social, or political issues without you even realizing that it’s happening.

• This 2017 study about “persuasive communication” experimented to see how much more effectively a person’s mind could be changed if the manipulator had access to that person’s psychological data

  “However, the investigation of large-scale psychological persuasion in the real world has been hindered by the questionnaire-based nature of psychological assessment. Recent research, however, shows that people’s psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.”

  Needless to say, the experiment showed a marked increase in persuasive campaigns’ success when the target’s psychological data had been used.

• This fascinating study from 2016 found that, since many persuasive campaigns rely on emotion — especially positive emotion — to change the mind, physically resisting reactions to those campaigns actually reduces the influence it has on you. The researchers referred to this as “embodied resistance”.

  “Controlling the expression of emotions elicited by an ad (for example refusing to smile) might be a fruitful way to resist the ad’s persuasive potential.”

• This eleven-year-old study in the Journal of Advertising talks about optimal use of repetition. The study’s authors acknowledge that repetition is a key to success but the study’s aim is to determine the most effective way to use that repetition as well as how long the effects of repetition last.

• If you really want to get into the weeds, this study shows how repetition doesn’t just increase a person’s recognition of your brand over other brands, it also decreases their recognition of other, non-repeated brands.

  (Do you see what I mean when I say they’ve spared no expense?)

• This paper, using magic as an example, talks about attentional capture and the neurological limits on the human mind that allow for guided focus by a manipulating, outside source.

  “Psychologist and magicians often think of attention as a ‘spotlight’ that enhances the items or parts of a scene we are focusing on. The attentional spotlight is not an accurate metaphor from a neuroscientific perspective, however: rather than making our object of interest more salient, our attentional system actively suppresses (via inhibitory neurons) how salient everything else is. That is, rather that illuminating whatever draws our interest, our attention gives us tunnel vision: it obscures all the rest1415161718192021222324 . Suppressed crucial information passes us by without ever entering our awareness.”

• This is the 1996 study referenced in the video that talks about how long the Illusory Truth Effect can last after the repetitions have ceased.

• This chapter from The Principles of Social Psychology talks about other methods that can be used to manipulate people with marketing and media, including emotion and perceived trustability.

• There are a lot of studies and analyses out there examining the different neurological and psychological factors that are at play when advertising is attempting to change our minds. The important thing to remember is that these methods are just as effective within fiction.

II. Fiction as Formation

It has long been understood that we ought to take care with the media we consume as it is forming us. Only recently have attempts been made to “debunk” this idea, an idea which has held true for literally centuries, if not millennia. Let’s look at some of the science behind the ways in which our media consumption changes and forms us.

II.a A Note on Desensitization

I mentioned at the beginning that the human mind doesn’t react to fictional violence and real life violence in the same way, and therefore doesn’t become desensitized to real life violence because of exposure to fictional violence. A lot of this overlaps with the question of increased aggression due to (or not due to) watching fictional violence, so please see that section if you want more resources on this topic.

• That said, this study, which I have previously linked, is one of the clearest examples of this point. Young college-aged people were exposed to graphic fictional violence and then they were shown clips of real life violence. It was found that they were not desensitized to the real life violence, that it still disturbed them. Crucially, it was also found that their empathy was not diminished.

II.b Let’s Talk About Porn (The Ways In Which Pornography Damages Your Mind and Your Character)

I can’t believe I have to do this. But for anyone who somehow wasn’t convinced that porn is bad, here’s some proof.

Put in context, fictional violence might not lead to increases in aggression or even violence in audiences, but here we have studies showing that real and simulated or even animated pornography result in increases in violent and aggressive behavior.

For those who already knew, there’s still some interesting information here, including the different ways that women react to pornography (compared to men).

• This article from 2014 cites studies done on men who had lost interest in real life sexual partners after prolonged pornography consumption. The authors explain this in terms of neuroplasticity. That is, our tastes and preferences can change over time with outside influence such as internet usage.

  “The sexual excitement of viewing pornography releases a chemical neurotransmitter named dopamine that activates the brain’s pleasure centres. Since ‘neurons that fire together wire together’, the repeated viewing of pornography effectively wires the pornographic images into the pleasure centres of the brain with the focused attention required for neuroplastic change. In other words, habitual viewers of pornography develop new brain maps based on the photos and videos they see. And since the brain operates on a “use it or lose it” principle, they long to keep those new maps activated. Consequently, pornography has an addictive power. Like all addicts, the men who [Dr. Norman] Doidge treated developed a tolerance to the photos and videos they observed and sought out progressively higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction.”

• This article from the 2013 edition of Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology takes a medical approach to the question of pornography consumption as an addiction. Dr. Hilton’s approach has to do with “an increased understanding of the function of the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward systems”, which is a key factor in any discussion of addiction.

• This article from the Journal of Neuroscience continues the medical side of neuroplasticity, addiction, and the altering of the brain’s tastes and preferences. A lot of this was highly medical and specialized and a bit over my head, but it’s still fascinating to read about how the brain’s ability to change can also make the brain vulnerable to wildly unhealthy habits.

• This peer-reviewed study examined the brains of people with compulsive sexual behavior and compared them to people with healthy brains particularly when viewing sexually explicit materials and non-sexual materials.

  One of the many fascinating things found in this study was that in those with compulsive sexual behavior when viewing explicit material, fMRI scans showed activity consistent with desire but not activity consistent with liking. That is, the reward system in their brain had rewired to desire what they saw despite the fact that they might not have even liked it. Which is consistent with what one sees in drug addicts. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was any medical basis in referring to — and treating — compulsive sexual behavior as an addiction.

• This fascinating experimental study conducted in 2018 attempted to determine if there was a connection between men viewing pornography and their negative behavior towards women. Most interesting was the inclusion of an “erotica” category in the study. The authors found that men who viewed degrading pornography had marked increase in negative attitudes towards women, including objectification and sexism. However, even erotica showed an increase in these areas. It was not as dramatic as the effects of degrading pornography, of course, but it is fascinating to learn that even loving, gentle, consensual erotica had a negative effect on the minds of the men viewing it. And this was only over the course of the study’s duration. One wonders what the effects would be after a year, or five years, or ten…

• In a rare study on the minds of women who consume pornography found that, contrary to expectations, women who consumed pornography did not respond by developing “empowering” sexual behavior, but rather they became more submissive. I won’t detail the nature of this submissive sexual behavior, but suffice to say it is violent, humiliating, and degrading. The younger the woman was when she started to consume pornography, the greater the effect.
  As I have said before, men and women respond to explicit sexual media in different ways. Men become more violent and more aggressive. Women can respond in that way, but typically they do not. They become more submissive and more willing to tolerate or even seek out intensely degrading, violent, even physically dangerous behavior, like choking.

• This Korean survey on over six hundred Korean college-aged heterosexual men determined that those who consume pornography are likely to try to act out porn scenes in real life, a point I think it’s worth underscoring given that many who defend pornography use the common line “we know the difference between fiction and reality” and yet, once again, it would seem that it just isn’t that simple.

• Another study showing that the more pornography a man consumes, the more likely he is to attempt to reenact it during sex and to use its imagery during sex to stay aroused.

• The question of pornography consumption intensifying over time — that is, the viewers’ tastes becoming more extreme as usage continues — is a difficult and complex one scientifically speaking. One can look at anecdotal evidence from people whose usage has become oppressive, people who find themselves drawn to more and more disturbing content, and you can use your own common sense to understand how this could easily happen. But collecting all the scientific data here would triple the length of this list. So I’m providing this link. This article will be frowned upon by many because it was put together by the folks over at fightthenewdrug.org, which is an anti-pornography organization and is therefore inherently biased.
  However, the linked article has over thirty citations from unbiased resources all across the scientific and academic world. It’s also not a piece of alarmist propaganda speaking in nothing but superlatives. It’s an honest, direct, clear treatment of the overall issue insofar as it is understand by respected, certified experts who have no affiliation with anti or pro-pornography organizations. If you’re genuinely interested in a nuanced discussion of the topic, this is a great place to start. I’ve personally looked through several of the studies cited and they provide valuable insight into the way the mind works in general, not just when pornography is being consumed.

  • The article mentions — as many people will tell you — that not everyone experiences this escalation. But to those who think that means that pornography could be safe: you should note that there’s no way to predict whether or not you’ll be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t experience escalating tastes. Considering how deep the pit goes, why would anyone risk that? I read the accounts of several men and women whose tastes eventually made it to CSAM. As I said, there’s a reason it’s called “degenerate”.

• Here is a link to that disturbing video of Minnesota Representative Finke making a case for allowing children access to pornography as it is “sex education”.

  • The “Paxton case” mentioned at the beginning is this case.

  • This is an interesting note defending age-verification laws as not a valid threat to freedom of speech

  • Another point I’d like to make is that even if children are, ostensibly, viewing pornography — or sexually explicit “education material” — for educational purposes, it is still objectively harming them. Please see the rest of this pornography section if, for some reason, that’s not something you entirely believe. When it comes time to teach a person about sex, there are perfectly adequate ways to do so without employing literal pornography.

• Related: This survey put together by the Department of Justice details, among other things, that one of the important strategies which pedophiles employ is exposing children to pornography. This desensitizes the children to the idea of sex and having sex, while easing them into increasingly extreme sexuality in general, and makes them open to producing sexual materials of themselves and giving it to adults.
  Many pedophiles use these methods to get children to make child pornography of themselves which the adults can then sell, a lower-risk method of producing CSAM.

II.c. Becoming What You Consume

There has been a lot of research done on both cultivation (mentioned above: the way fiction can change our minds and opinions and even our perception of reality), and also on formation from fiction. This, in particular, is often called “identification” and refers to audiences’ tendency to latch onto their favorite characters and begin to assimilate their traits and habits into their own personalities. Why this happens has been studied and theorized at length.

• This research paper from 2005 examines young adults’ (ages 18-28) identification to see what specific motivations and traits male and female young adults tended to look for in their favorite characters. The introduction provides highly useful information about the concept of “identification”.

  “All of the definitions [of identification] involve a bond or connection between an individual and another person (or entity), such that the individual adopts traits, attitudes, or behaviors of the other person, or incorporates the other’s characteristics into his or her sense of self.”252627

  Taking it further, the paper goes on to explain the phenomenon of “wishing identification” which extends beyond the time during which the media is consumed. That is, many people identify with or admire a character while watching the media or reading the book, this is one process. A secondary process occurs when the audience begins to wish to become more like the person:

  “Bandura2829 contended that the modeling process goes far beyond simple imitation of behavior, to include the changing of attitudes, values, aspirations, and other characteristics to match those of a model.”

• This interesting study examined closely the possibility of a link between the introduction of specific telenovelas in Brazil and a corresponding drop in fertility rates in otherwise fertile women.

  “We find that, after controlling for time varying controls and for time-invariant area characteristics, the presence of the Globo [producers of the telenovelas in question] signal leads to significantly lower fertility. […] Our empirical analysis on children naming patterns and on novela content suggests that these results may be interpreted not only in terms of exposure to television, but also of exposure to the particular reality portrayed in Brazilian novelas.” [emphasis added]

• This book published in 2017 talks at length about how fiction media can be used to change social norms among a given populace. This book doesn’t focus only on negative social change but also positive, such as de-normalizing child marriage. It is meant to provide a kind of blueprint for identifying and then altering social norms.

  “The media are popular tools for changing target behaviors. The range of technologies may include broadcast media such as radio, film and television, newspapers or pamphlets, billboards, internet, and even public events. Common interventions include information campaigns, edutainment (ranging

  from soap operas to video games), and other more modest form of collective entertainment, such as village theater.” (page 147)

  If you read the book you’ll find that a lot of the science I have talked about in this essay/list of resources is being actively employed with fiction media to deliberately adjust social norms.

  If it is generally understood by those going about changing “target behaviors” that fiction has this ability, then perhaps the targets whose behavior is being changed should also accept this reality.

II.d. Reading Will Make You Smarter

Yet another bit of common sense, but which is fortunately backed up by a lot of science. There are distinct and traceable links between reading level and vocabulary size; there are distinct and traceable links between vocabulary size and cognitive abilities. Therefore, there is a link between reading challenging books and becoming smarter:

• This 1993 article by Keith E. Stanovich was among the first to tackle with scientific rigor the question “Does Reading Make You Smarter?” And his answer was an emphatic “Yes.” This 48-page paper also details the controversy surrounding this idea which has come to be called the Great Divide, which is defined as the understanding that there is a cognitive divide between the literate and the illiterate that goes beyond mere ability to read. Many in different academic fields viewed it as self-evident that literacy and the act of reading improved various areas of intelligence and cognition. But, he explained, in the 80s there arose a movement bent on debunking this idea as a mere myth. Stanovich takes the time to explain how the myth idea is nonsensical. This might be one of the most important and thorough papers on the topic, if just an introduction.

• This meta-analysis of hundreds of studies determined that there was a “small and significant” link between reading fiction specifically and social cognition. This link was determined to be causal, that is, reading fiction was found to directly improve social cognition.

  “The notion that fiction reading and social cognition engage similar processes is further supported by neuroimaging work demonstrating an overlap in the networks recruited during story reading and theory of mind30, and

  increased engagement of the brain’s default mode network while simulating literary passages with social content31. Second, fiction may provide concrete content about human psychology and social interaction, and about distant countries, cultures, and peoples that readers may never have access to otherwise32. In this sense, fiction may help to build up a reader’s social knowledge.

• This study (which was a set of five experiments) found that there was an increase in the readers’ theory of mind when they read literary fiction, as opposed to reading popular fiction, nonfiction, or nothing at all.

  The idea of “literary fiction” itself and even a definition of the genre is difficult to pin down. It has been said that literary fiction can be identified by its more active quality, that is, the reader has to do more active work to understand descriptions and even the events of the plot. The authors of this study provide a loose but somewhat helpful definition:

  “The category of literary fiction has been contested on the grounds that it is merely a marker of social class, but features of the modern literary novel set it apart from most best-selling thrillers or romances. Miall and Kuiken33 3435

  emphasize that through the systematic use of phonological, grammatical, and semantic stylistic devices, literary fiction defamiliarizes its readers. The capacity of literary fiction to unsettle readers’ expectations and challenge their thinking is also reflected in Roland Barthes’s36 distinction between writerly and readerly texts. Although readerly texts—such as most popular genre fiction—are intended to entertain their mostly passive readers, writerly—or literary—texts engage their readers creatively as writers.”

  “Theory of mind” has been described elsewhere as:

  “…the human capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one's own beliefs and desires.”37

  I don’t know about all of you, but I have personally noticed a marked decline recently in the average person’s ability to understand that other people might hold different beliefs and desires from their own. For myself personally this is most often evidenced in the frequent accusation of “grifter!” by which the accuser presents the idea that they cannot conceive of another person holding a different view from their own and so this person (me) must be faking it for money.

• This study from 2015 looked at the physical brain development of readers versus non-readers or less skilled readers using MRI machines. The results suggested that the children who were proficient readers had a different “development trajectory in brain reading regions”. The analysis found physical brain development to be affected by reading.

• This 2025 study found a direct link between participants’ reading ability and their vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. Interestingly, the study included internet content and found that resources like social media did have as much of a positive effect in this area as books and websites which published news stories and cultural imformation (e.g. longer articles).

Conclusion

The simple reality is that our ability to distinguish between fiction and reality isn’t that simple. How fiction alters our minds and changes our personalities, perceptions, opinions, even our beliefs is extremely complex. But at the end of the day, there is no avoiding the fact that fiction absolutely changes us.

I said throughout the video and I’ll say it again now, one of the major ways we can avoid being completely at the mercy of the storytellers who entertain (and sometimes manipulate) us — and the reason people in the past tended to be more stable in this regard — is by increasing our daily contact with reality. Yet again, this effect will be mitigated and our minds in general will be healthier without social media guiding our perceptions of reality.

Moreover, binge-watching media and binge-reading books is all well and good once in a while, but in our isolated society doing so habitually prevents your mind from being corrected by either contact with reality or by contact with other people who can challenge what you’ve come to believe from the media you’ve consumed in isolation. This total lack of a social element in modern media consumption is unprecedented in history. It is only by touching reality with our own two hands that we can begin to understand whether what we’ve read — or watched — has any basis in reality.

My work is reader-supported. To support me and to have future posts and essays delivered directed to your inbox, please consider subscribing:

Subscribe now

Modern moral thought is needlessly complex. Complexity has taken the place of nuance, presenting a state of moral grayness which, though purporting to be complex, is actually childishly simple: It’s mean to say that someone is bad.

Within the realm of criminal matters, this takes a more specific form:

It’s mean to punish people.

This attitude — both morally and judicially — has, naturally, permeated storytelling. Films and series in which criminals are either shown to have been more morally upright than the heroes, or in which the criminals are given a second, third, fourth chance to Do The Right Thing are far more common these days than stories in which criminals are punished, roll credits. And while it might seem harmless — and even socially beneficial — to portray bad guys reforming, the issue arises not in this itself, but in how the reformation occurs. More often than not, a villain experiences a change of heart only when someone is nice to him. Anyone who has ever come face to face with evil understands that this is painfully childish. Yet, the repeated fictional reinforcement of this idea instills in people the idea that kindness is morally superior because it delivers results while avoiding the barbarism of harsh punishment.

Because for writers to whom punishment is simply too mean, any system that avoids the prickly act of meting out uncomfortable justice must be shown to be not only successful but superior. It must be presented as morally more progressive, psychologically less barbaric, and socially more effective than “mere punishment”.

In the 2013 Japanese film The Brain Man (based on the Edogawa Rampo award-winning novel of the same name by Urio Shudo1) the full reality of this needless complexity is presented with disturbing clarity.

This story functions as a mystery tale, but is, in reality, an ambitious philosophical examination of the following social observation: “we’ve made society so morally complex that when we need to access the simple solution to a simple problem, we’re no longer capable of it”.

As such, it isn’t well-suited to a mere film and so the various threads of these ambitious themes are occasionally knotted or aren’t entirely followed through to the end. However, this isn’t meant to be a review of this flawed film, but an essay about the fascinating moral landscape it painted within its uncomfortable story. As such, there will be spoilers.

There are three entire plots at work here. The first is a simple cop drama in which the police are hunting a mysterious serial bomber. The second is a tangent examining the background and formation of a man who was one of the chief suspects in the aforementioned plague of bombings. The third is a sociological fairy tale in which a psychiatrist basks in the success of her life’s goal: reformation through pure compassion.

Thematically, these three stories coincide and interweave quite well. In a sense, they represent three different modern approaches to moral justice.

The first storyline presents the standard police approach, represented by Detective Chaya, a grizzled, irritable police detective who has been working tirelessly to find and stop a serial bomber using primarily old-fashioned means: investigation, legwork, and gallons of bad coffee. He serves The Law and believes staunchly in a rigid judicial system by which criminals are captured, tried, and then sentenced according to established laws and overseen by established authorities.

The second storyline offers a very modern approach, both in terms of technological advancement and in terms of modern society’s philosophical and emotional mindset towards morality and criminals. In this one, a psychiatrist has been attempting to establish widespread implementation of her criminal reform methods, which consist in, primarily, the use of total compassion and empathy to emotionally break down and then rebuild hardened criminals. Her approach to justice eschews the entire concept of “punishment” in favor of empathy and love.

In the third storyline we are shown a system of justice that has probably experienced the longest lifespan of any of the three. It is absolute. Horrible criminals are met with simple death. The eponymous “brain man” is a (seemingly) emotionless weapon aimed at criminality. If he finds a murderer, he kills him. There is no room for nuance, no space for negotiation, no interest in reform. He doesn’t hesitate, and, because he is brilliant beyond any analyst’s ability to measure, he is also never wrong.

The film effectively puts these three philosophies of justice in the arena of the real world — film real world, but you get the idea — to see which does the most good.

Perhaps you can guess the outcome.

When we say “does the most good”, there are two primary “goods” which need to be considered. The first is obvious: which method prevents the most crime? The second is a bit less obvious, but still a very real factor: which method is most able to provide healing and closure to victims?

The focus of this essay is primarily going to be on the latter two methods of justice: the psychiatrist — and champion of kindness — Mariko Washiya, and the emotionless “brain man” Ichiro Suzuki.

Dr. Washiya is a woman living constantly on the edge of an annihilating blade, who has made it her life’s work to embrace the knife’s edge by refusing to acknowledge its existence. She is a woman tortured by a tremendous need for justice, for closure, but who has, for reasons we will examine, chosen to hinge her survival on its refusal.

One of the more compelling periphery details about Dr. Mariko Washiya is a thread of intense selfishness, but one which is the perpetuation of a cycle. Herself the victim of selfishness — she is forced to care for her morbidly obese mother whose maternal concern for her daughter is limited to the hope that she’s always around to tend to her many needs — she is herself now motivated mainly be selfishness. Her motivations when it comes to criminal reform and justice are exclusively self-serving.

Dr. Washiya’s desire to implement a program by which criminals can be reformed by pure compassion seems, even in the first scene in which she appears, to be motivated not by a desire to actually reform criminals, but rather by a desire to mitigate the trauma and depression suffered by the surviving family members of the victims. That is to say: herself.

Several years prior to the events of the film, she had lost her much younger brother. He had been tortured, sexually assaulted, and then murdered by a pedophile who was himself a juvenile. The trauma and grief of this loss consumed and controlled her. But, despite her flaws, she was a resilient woman, and so she redirected that trauma and grief into a kind of monumental denial. For several years she had been undertaking to prove that the worst criminals imaginable — pedophile murderers, for instance — could be reformed by pure kindness. Her glowing test case, her proud success story, was the reformation of the very man who had killed her brother.

As the story began, this young, remade man was about to be released and was, by all accounts a completely different person from the monster who murdered a child in the most horrific way imaginable; he stood as the living proof that her method works. He was proof to all of society that punishment itself is barbaric and unnecessary, because kindness can actually mend the broken morality of a hardened monster.

And, she insisted again and again, overcoming the emotional urge for justice was a far more effective balm for healing than any kind of judicial or extra-judicial retribution. She had transcended her grief and her hatred in her god-like reshaping of the monster who had destroyed her and destroyed her family.

Yet, she was a woman living in muted agony, every day a battle for survival. Her darkened home was occupied by the growing, malignant hatred of her depressed mother. Her own darkened mind was occupied by the horror of what had befallen her brother and the daily retraumatizing she inflicted upon herself by attempting to reform his murderer.

In a sense, Mariko Washiya was the horrific final form of suicidal empathy.

Let’s step away from Dr. Washiya and her shining success case for a moment and look at her mirror opposite, her social and philosophical counter, Ichiro Suzuki.

Ichiro Suzuki was wholly other from anyone else in the cast, and even from most other people in existence. As a character, he was difficult to analyze mainly because he himself never felt the need to explain himself. All we could know about him was the combined observations of the people with whom he interacted.

As a child he had been found to be quite out of the ordinary. Called by his doctor “an abandoned doll”, he appeared to be a kind of blank slate. Resistant to pain, seemingly devoid of emotion, indifferent to stimuli, and perfectly obedient, he would do nothing without instruction, not even use the bathroom or eat. Taken in by his wealthy grandfather after the deaths of his parents in a hit-and-run, his upbringing was meticulous and thorough. In the course of his education, Ichiro’s grandfather recognized that the boy had a seemingly infinite capacity for intelligence in addition to his infinite docility and resistance to pain.

However, the relative peace of this childhood was shrouded always by the pall of grief. The man who had killed Ichiro’s parents in a hit-and-run had never been brought to justice and so for his grandfather the wound remained always open and raw. As the pain grew more intense, he decided to refocus his unusual grandson’s education to provide him with a particular set of skills.

His grandfather recognized in Ichiro an unusual and particular combination of traits that seemed to have cosmically aligned to create the ideal warrior for justice: His unusual strength, agility, and resistance to pain made him uniquely suited to physical combat; his photographic memory and incredible intelligence gave him sharp observation skills and keen instincts; his perfect obedience and docility made him capable of carrying out difficult and unsavory tasks without hesitation; and his lack of emotions made the strain of killing relatively easy for him to endure.

The old man’s grief or madness had convinced him that his strange, but somehow angelic grandson had been formed into the ideal soul to become the perfect arbiter of justice. Ichiro was, his grandfather told him, meant to rid the world of filth and evil. And so he began to focus his education on making him an efficient killer while also instilling in him a sense of duty and of right and wrong.

It’s here that we recognize the first major point of digression between Ichiro and Dr. Washiya. Ichiro had been taught that dispatching horrible criminals was an aspect of morality. More than that, he was taught that it was controlled by morality. That is, it was actually immoral to overlook injustice.

Dr. Washiya, on the other hand, had convinced herself that it was immoral not to overlook injustice.

Ichiro’s first justice-driven execution was somehow ironic. After years of hoping and praying that his grandson would choose to take up the crusade for justice, the old man was shockingly, even coincidentally, killed during a home invasion robbery.

Ichiro calmly killed the robber.

And then he disappeared entirely.

Some years later, Ichiro entered the film’s story as a suspect arrested by Detective Chaya on suspicion of being one of the serial bombers he and the rest of the police force had been trying to find.

Once in custody, Ichiro was a baffling prisoner; he wouldn’t speak except to give his name and other incidentals, he wouldn’t explain himself, he wouldn’t answer questions or even acknowledge the officers questioning him. He was unmoved when threatened with the death penalty, uninterested in the gawking eyes of the press. Given the overall strangeness of his behavior and the nationwide publicity of the case, the police decided to preemptively have Ichiro assessed for mental fitness to stand trial. For this, he was taken to a hospital where Dr. Mariko Washiya was placed in charge of his evaluation.

And thus our two mirror opposites, our two wholly different approaches to justice and the entire concept of moral reform, found themselves sitting across a table from each other.

Ichiro Suzuki’s evaluation period was an interesting one. He behaved in ways that couldn’t be comprehended by anyone. Docile and polite most of the time, at other random moments he seemed to snap. On one occasion he brutally attacked a fellow prisoner. What the police — and Dr. Washiya — did not know was that the prisoner attacked by Ichiro had been a violent, unrepentant murderer whose crimes had gone undetected.

After the attack, Ichiro immediately went back to being a polite, docile inmate.

Dr. Washiya, fascinated by the juxtaposition, spent a decent amount of time making an honest effort to understand her unusual patient. Eventually she found a clue to his identity and began to pursue it in an effort to learn more about his past. For this, she enlisted the help of Detective Chaya.

They tracked his background all the way to some of the teachers who had been hired by his grandfather, who told them what they knew all the way up to Ichiro’s disappearance after the death of his grandfather.

Detective Chaya then took up the threads of the investigation. Soon after, he discovered a pattern of murders: horrible criminals who had escaped justice had been summarily killed. Perpetrator unknown.

Ichiro had indeed chosen to take up his grandfather’s crusade. Why he chose to do so was never explained, almost entirely because Ichiro never seemed to feel the need to explain himself. He had no interest in “reputation” or in the opinions of others. But whatever the reason, his finely-honed skills and innate intelligence had combined to give him almost psychic instincts by which he could identify a murderer by little more than body language. And he was never wrong. He was a walking, talking one-man judicial department: investigator, judge, and executioner.

It was around this time that the police realized that Ichiro was not the serial bomber, but had actually been hunting the serial bomber.

Thereafter, Detective Chaya — to his credit — found himself struggling with his assessment of Ichiro’s morality. He was a murderer. But he was killing the worst criminals imaginable, criminals who could not be caught or tried due to some judicial loophole or shortcoming. His inability to formulate a solid opinion regarding Ichiro’s rightness or wrongness unsettled him for the rest of the story.

Dr. Washiya’s reaction to everything they had learned about Ichiro was very different. She experienced a kind of deep, aching horror to learn of the young man’s particular formation. How awful, she thought, to have been formed into a murderer, someone forced to kill criminals. Perhaps, she thought, she could save him from that terrible, terrible fate.

Her tendency to project her emotional reality onto others had been demonstrated throughout the film. Even when Detective Chaya expressed an impassioned desire to see the serial bomber punished to the fullest legal extent, she accused him of letting his emotions get the better of him. This is a common argument of the clinically kind: that kindness is inherently non-emotional, while all other reactions are excessively emotional.

The reality, which I’m sure most of you know, is that kindness is exclusively emotional, but it is also, by far, the easiest emotion. Kindness does not even necessitate forgiveness, as forgiveness presupposes some kind of judgement. Kindness exists and thrives best in an environment in which moral judgements simply are not made. Anger, rage, forgiveness, even mercy all require moral judgement. Kindness does not.

She had been kind and therefore superior when she had taken it upon herself to reform the young man who had killed her brother. She couldn’t understand the mentality of a person who was choosing not to be kind. Surely, she seemed to think, if Ichiro had the choice to not kill, he would prefer that. After all, isn’t it nicer, more pleasant, less horrible, to just be kind? And, too, she seemed to say, being kind works.

On the last day of their contact with each other, in an effort to “break through” to Ichiro, Dr. Washiya told him the truth about her brother and about the young reformed pedophile. In this final conversation, in the course of her startling revelation, she presented to him what she believed to be an unsolvable moral quandary: she couldn’t bring herself to kill the boy who had killed her younger brother; could he kill a child who had killed a child?

To her, the acts were identical. Killing a juvenile pedophile was the exact same act as a pedophile killing a young boy. To her, the idea that Ichiro had been “forcibly” made into something that would do the former made him effectively no better than the latter. And as she had already saved one of those, now she could just as easily save another, surely.

Furiously, desperately, frantically she tried to convince him. “You don’t have to do it anymore. You don’t have to kill anymore.” Her desperation in this moment is profoundly telling.

In storytelling we learn that in all conversations — especially major, climactic conversations — each person in the conversation must have some goal they’re trying to accomplish. Listening to Dr. Washiya, it was clear that there were two goals at work in her mind: the goal she thought was motivating her, but then beneath that simmered the truth.

To her, she was desperately trying to save Ichiro from a life as a murderer.

But simmering beneath that was her desire to pull him into her moral fantasyland, like the crabs in the bucket who stop their fellow crabs when they try to escape. It was clear to her, on an instinctive level, that Ichiro had tapped into a more primal, more true understanding of human nature, and that knowledge had allowed him the kind of mental and spiritual freedom she simply could not access.

She perceived in him a strength greater than her own. But she also perceived something else: he had the courage and the will to kill violent, monstrous criminals, including the one who had killed his grandfather, and the one who had killed his parents in the hit-and-run. He had had the will to exact justice. For him, the ledger was easy to balance. For her, there was no closing of accounts. The way she clung to kindness, the way she refused to pass judgment, the way she, in a sense, clung to the killer who had murdered her brother kept the wounds open both for her and for her depressed mother. She knew this and yet couldn’t make herself alter course. To her, it wasn’t fair that he was permitted simple justice while she had to toil under the weight of society’s mandated law of kindness. This was particularly evident when she admitted to having desired to kill the boy who had killed her brother.

“But,” she added automatically, almost like a programmed response, “killing him won’t make any of the wounds we suffered disappear.”

Which brings us to the second issue in all talks of justice: which method makes us feel the best? Another hallmark of the modern approach to morality, the most important element is how it makes everyone feel. If vengeance doesn’t make us feel better then it is inherently worthless. That is, to her and many like her, the fact that harsh justice can’t erase trauma meant it had no social or moral value.

Yet, she (and many like her) had convinced themselves that kindness could erase trauma. But everything about her was proof that this simply was not true. She was a woman imprisoned by her trauma, imprisoned by the faux-moral laws she had set for herself and by which alone she was permitted to find peace.

And when Ichiro refused to answer or even acknowledge any of her claims to moral superiority, she continued by congratulating herself. She had counseled the murdering boy. She had reformed him. She had fixed him. Earlier in the film, she had smiled when she had been compared to God.

But then Ichiro, still without answering, was led away and Dr. Washiya was left behind.

Not long after, the reformed pedophile was released and sent happily on his way, eager to start his life over again. The action of the film then focused on Ichiro’s escape and the final showdown between him and the serial bomber.

But at the very end of the film, Dr. Washiya was contacted by Ichiro who informed her that he was going to kill her reformed pedophile. Why he bothered to tell her was not posited by the writers or the characters, but my assumption is that however little emotion Ichiro might have had, he did have reason. And his reason told him that Dr. Washiya needed to understand that her method did not work.

He forced her to see this for herself when he sent her to the reformed pedophile’s house where she found, next to the young man’s dead body, a little boy tied up naked in a cabinet.

No, Dr. Washiya. Kindness cannot fix a pedophile. Pretending it can in order to make oneself feel better is the epitome of barbaric cruelty.

In a pitch-perfect twist to her entire philosophy, Ichiro informed her that he had corrected her mistake — by killing the released pedophile — as an act of kindness to her to repay her for treating him with compassion.

The kindness of Dr. Washiya would have brought about the horrific death of yet another innocent child. The “barbaric” cruelty of Ichiro Suzuki saved his life. This is the paradox of kindness; more often than not, its fruits are far crueler than those of cruelty itself.

And so, after years of labor and pain and denial and cognitive dissonance, Mariko Washiya’s life’s work was put in a body bag and she was left even more hollowed out than she had been on the day they showed her her brother’s dead body.

After, Dr. Washiya railed at Ichiro: “You’re not God! What kind of evil merits death? No one gets to decide good and evil; nor do they have the power to pass judgement.” But after all of this useless, moralistic cope, in the end she said weakly: “You destroyed everything I built.”

But what had she built?

Earlier in the film, in a moment of naked rage, she had admitted that she had not treated the pedophile in an effort to reform him, but because she had wanted to make herself feel better.

The “everything” that Ichiro had destroyed was, very simply, the house of cards she had been using as a scaffolding for her own coping mechanism. Ichiro had showed her, had forced her to really see, that her profoundly selfish adherence to kindness had been worse than fake, it had been criminally malicious.

This is not a difficult matter to a mind unhindered by the social complexity of moral “nuance”, a useless word in this instance, which does not indicate nuance but only cowardice or idiocy. Ichiro Suzuki — and the writers of this film — knew instinctively that compassion does not cure evil. Most of us know this. Kindness cannot fix something broken. Kindness and compassion are rooted in emotion and thus are fleeting, as are their effects. A bit of brief remorse brought on by emotion is not enough to mend the broken moral foundation of someone who abuses and murders children. Ichiro knew this, because Ichiro did not face evil with emotion, but with the simple logic of right and wrong, cause and effect.

Yes, it’s mean to kill a killer. But to Ichiro the arithmetic was simple: kill the killer, or let him go so he can kill more innocent people. Which of these is truly mean?

There is a subset of law-abiding citizens of every nation and culture who find it fundamentally impossible to accept that some people are just bad. Perhaps something could have prevented that outcome, but nothing can change that state once it’s reached. There is a newer and growing subset of law-abiding citizens who find it barbarous to mete out any punishment, as if we are somehow “better” than the criminals over whom we stand in judgment and to punish them would make us “no different”. Perhaps we are better than them, perhaps we aren’t. But Ichiro Suzuki would argue — if he even bothered to argue at all — that kindness has nothing at all to do with this equation.

However, this strange philosophical precept has made it into modern storytelling on such a wide scale that it seems like people at large have begun to take this fallacy for granted.

The simple, uncomfortable reality was that Ichiro’s sense of right and wrong was much, much stronger than Mariko Washiya’s. And that of most of the civilized world.

While all the rest was going on, the story of the teenage terrorist added yet another layer to the idea of kindness.

This young woman, introduced at the very beginning of the film, was a sadist. A deeply sick person who reveled in the pain of others and believed it was her God-given right to kill and maim as much as she possibly could. She believed she was a higher being and so exerted her superiority by inflicting pain.

Presented as a double of Ichiro Suzuki, her existence asked a different set of uncomfortable questions. In time it was learned that she had had a very similar upbringing to his. Raised in wealth, surrounded by softness, kindness, attention, devoid of most emotions, and unusually intelligent, she actually had a distinct advantage: her upbringing had not been peppered by profound loss, as had Ichiro’s with the loss of his parents and grandfather. By all accounts, she should have just as easily become another crusader for justice, instead of descending into sadistic, chaotic psychopathy. But this was not the case. Reveling in her detachment from morality and consequences, she deemed herself superior to Ichiro who was beholden to a moral code.

Which, in a sense, made her much more similar to Dr. Washiya who also believed herself superior to Ichiro’s difficult, strict moral code.

After everything seen and heard, Dr. Washiya still begged Ichiro Suzuki not to kill this sadistic serial bomber, even after she had tortured both of them at length and killed countless people by bombing a hospital, laughing all the while.

The thing is, if Ichiro Suzuki had “won” by killing the teenage terrorist, that victory would have torn down the lies Dr. Washiya had spent years using to protect herself. Justice actually meant nothing to her. Nor did the feelings of Ichiro Suzuki. The only thing that mattered was her own feelings. Stopping a sadist from continuing her reign of terror was not important. Had the girl escaped and continued to kill, Dr. Washiya would not have had any difficulty sleeping at night.

But letting Ichiro kill the girl, letting him prove that there really was a simple solution to problems like these — legality or illegality aside — meant that all the pain she had put herself through after the murder of her little brother had been pointless.

In the end it was Detective Chaya who both executed the teenage bomber and let Ichiro Suzuki go. The grizzled servant of The Law had at last come to understand and accept the reality of human nature and society.

This reality, which he and Ichiro knew and which Dr. Washiya refused to acknowledge, was that her desire to “save” Ichiro from a life of hunting and killing was not noble or morally superior, but that it was something she wanted for herself.

Ichiro understood that his work was necessary. Detective Chaya understood that his work was necessary. Dr. Washiya couldn’t endure that because it flew in the face of her belief that kindness was the only way to make the pain go away.

Ironically, after Ichiro Suzuki killed the pedophile who had murdered Dr. Washiya’s brother, her mother finally decided to unearth herself from her prison of depression. In the end, ugly, mean, absolute justice did make some of the pain go away.

Is this essay nothing more than five thousand words on the merits of vigilante justice? Not at all. The great thing about difficult, challenging storytelling is that it makes us consider difficult, challenging things.

Dr. Washiya is not the only person in the world who was raised to believe that being kind and compassionate were good things. Many modern societies are overrun with this supposition. And while it is true that kindness is good and compassion is a virtue, their merits are often so overstated that we, as human beings living together in communities, no longer accept the fact that other options might be better in some situations.

A good story well told can force us to take a step back from ideas that we have spent our entire lives taking for granted. This is, in some ways, the entire point of literature. A million other books and movies have been published that present situations in which kindness and compassion won the day. But the writers of The Brain Man (book and film) sought to challenge that idea in a way that made their audiences think.

So, tell me: what do you think?

Table of Contents

I. The Ways in Which AI Damages the Mind

II. AI is Stupid, Actually

III. Studies Regarding Doomscrolling

IV. Difficulty is Good for You

V. Cautionary Notes on Television

VI. Miscellaneous

In response to the second video I ever posted on the internet, a comment was made regarding the use of AI by writers. This comment was responding to a previous aside I had made in another thread of comments. I had stated, merely, that writers who choose to lazily make use of AI in their writing will degrade in ability rapidly, meanwhile the human writers who are constantly laboring to improve their craft will gradually become better and better. In time, the gap will widen to such a degree that AI writing will leave readers desperate for anything human made. That is to say, human writers have no need to fear AI writers.

The commenter agreed with me and added: “You’ve summarized in this sentence: ‘The good news for the rest of us is that the more lazy writers rely on AI, the more stories written without AI will shine and stand out.’ The reality of AI that none see. Creativity is an exercise; you lose it if you don’t use it.”

This comment of his has since gained over three thousand likes and over seventy replies. It has spawned its own argument, one that has lasted over a year and is still, now and again, added to. From time to time I will drop in and read through some of the replies. Many agree that AI ought to never be used. Just as many — if not more — believe that AI may be used but only in the planning or brainstorming or editing processes.

I have seen many writers say — rather hastily, as if fearing condemnation — that they do use AI but not ever to write the prose. There is a universal tone in the voice of all such people that bespeaks the instinctive sense that they know they are doing something wrong.

And they are. Very, very wrong. Although perhaps “wrong” is not quite the right word. A better word might be “damaging” or “dangerous” or even “destructive”. You might think any of this alliterative trinity to be overstated, but let me explain.

In modern popular discourse, the core of every question of wrongness when it comes to the use of AI in creative endeavors is ethics. There is the unsettling matter that generative AI harvests — with or without consent — the work of humans in order to “generate” its own “art”. This matter alone is enough to stop many people from allowing AI to write their prose or their poetry for them. Which is, I suppose, admirable to some degree. The idea that is central there, is that others ought not be wronged in the production of one’s art. A worthy ethical consideration, but it’s only a piece of the picture.

There is a reason creation is a uniquely human undertaking. When I hear a writer tell me that he is using AI to “brainstorm” or “plot” his story, he seems to believe that this is the less important aspect of the process. The prose, he has decided, is more personal and therefore ought to never be touched by a machine. However he, like so many other writers, has failed to understand that the prose is only one-tenth of the process of creation. The brainstorming and the plotting and the planning and considerations, these are the meat of the writing process. It is in this, more so than in any other part of the writer’s undertaking, that his humanness is most essential.

But what happens, I find myself asking, if we turn over this process to a machine?

I. The Ways In Which AI Damages the Mind

• This study from April 2026 (???) describes an experiment conducted on students in secondary school. This is the study that shows how students who used LLMs for their assignment experienced higher satisfaction, yet had vastly inferior comprehension. The students themselves believed that the LLM usage was very helpful, despite the results. The study’s authors perceive AI usage to be positive as it increased student interest in assignments. They makes many statements using “possibly”, “potentially”, “could”, etc. when trying to predict various glitteringly optimistic outcomes of incorporating AI into the reading process, completely disregarding the results of their own study.

  “And yet, using an LLM for comprehension-focused reading, even if it is with the intention to understand and learn a text, has the inherent risk of offloading the thinking process to the LLM. When learners depend excessively on LLMs for answers and explanations, they may be less inclined to employ self-explanation and elaboration strategies that are essential for comprehension and meaningful learning [...] Indeed, a recent review found that LLM use can lead to a reduction in mental effort (Deng et al., 2025), and over-use of LLMs could lead to shallow processing, where learners passively receive information without actively engaging in deep cognitive processing or critical thinking.”

  (This, I believe, is the New Toy Effect™, and also the perception that a thing is “better” because it feels easier. Despite the fact that negative effects are clearly present.)

  From the “Outcomes” section of the study (note: “Notes” means the student only took notes while reading; “LLM + Notes” means the student used a combination of LLM and note-taking; and “LLM” means the student only used LLM to aid in study:

  “Specifically, students performed significantly better with Notes compared to LLM and with LLM + Notes compared to LLM for both literal retention and comprehension. For free recall, students showed significantly better performance with Notes compared to LLM but there was no significant difference between LLM + Notes compared to LLM.”

• This study from 2025 assesses the comprehension of complex, specialized texts when readers used AI-generated simplified explainers.

• This article from 2025 describes one woman’s cognitive decline after only two years of regular AI usage for work projects.

  “AI is designed to replicate the solutions we might reach with more time, making it easy to delegate tasks like reasoning, problem-solving, and ensuring accuracy. At first glance, this might not seem harmful. But the truth is, the process matters more than the outcome. Destinations reached through AI shortcuts are inherently different from those achieved without it, even if they seem identical on the surface.”

  and also

  “I had over-relied on AI, hooked on the rush of it giving me fast answers that boosted my productivity, churning out deliverables like clockwork. I was vaping my way through prompts and answers, giving myself artificial injections of dopamine and serotonin that could have otherwise naturally come from thinking deeply about something for a long-time and finally reaching a satisfying conclusion.”

• Yet another study showing how AI does indeed decrease cognitive load, but that decrease results in a corresponding decrease in reasoning and comprehension.

  “Results indicated that students using LLMs experienced significantly lower cognitive load. However, despite this reduction, these students demonstrated lower-quality reasoning and argumentation in their final recommendations compared to those who used traditional search engines.”

• This is the lengthy study that used EEG analysis to determine that significantly less of the brain was being used when completing a task using LLMs. This was referred to by the study authors as “cognitive debt”.

  “Cognitive debt defers mental effort in the short term but results in long-term costs, such as diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, decreased creativity. When participants reproduce suggestions without evaluating their accuracy or relevance, they not only forfeit ownership of the ideas but also risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives.”

  and

  “As the educational impact of LLM use only begins to settle with the general population, in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of a likely decrease in learning skills based on the results of our study.” (emphasis added by me.)

  One detail from this study describes how participants who used LLMs didn’t really feel like they had full ownership of the resulting work. Nor did they feel satisfaction with it. The ones who used their brains only were more satisfied, and those who weren’t believed that they would have done better had they had more time.
  This study is over two hundred pages long and has a tremendous amount of data. Worth a glance, if nothing else.

• This is the interview with the French professor in which he expounds on his observations regarding AI and information.

  “The widespread use of the internet and social media has already weakened our relationship with knowledge. Of course, these tools have tremendous applications in terms of access to information. But contrary to what they claim, they are less about democratising knowledge than creating a generalised illusion of knowledge.” (emphasis added by me)

• This analysis from 2024 and 2025 shows how people were using AI. For example:

  

• This report details the various ways AI is being used in the world as of October 2025. There is a tremendous amount of data here and all of it is sourced.

• This article from Authors Alliance explains how publishers can sell your work to companies looking to train their AI.

  “Numerous reports recently pointed out that based on Taylor and Francis’s parent company’s market update, the British academic publishing giant has agreed to a $10 million USD AI training deal with Microsoft. Earlier this year, another major academic publisher, John Wiley and Sons, recorded $23 million in one-time revenue from a similar deal with a non-disclosed tech company. Meta even considered buying Simon & Schuster or paying $10 per book to acquire its rights portfolio for AI training.

  With few exceptions (a notable one being Cambridge University Press), publishers have not bothered to ask their authors whether they approve of these agreements.”

  This article also includes tips and advice and other resources for writers who find themselves working within such a publishing world.

• This interesting study worked to determine whether or not AI and LLM usage produced a cognitive bias in the human doing the work. The result was that there was indeed a noticeable bias present. Other interesting factors were also noted, such as:

  “It is important to mention that the topics generated by the LLMs were more generalized and did not have clear distinctions from one another. It often happened that a few topics in L [the LLM-generated topic list] had overlapping definitions. In contrast, all of the human-generated topic lists (C and H) were more distinct and clearly separated by their definitions.”

  Not to oversimplify but: the human work was clearer, more precise, and better than the AI/LLM-guided work.
  (This study, like so many other AI and LLM studies, also commented on how much easier the work was for the humans using AI and LLMs, and how much less “labor intensive and time consuming” the workloads were.)

  The study’s authors also observed that the group of humans who were working with LLM at first questioned the LLM’s generalized labels, etc. But gradually grew comfortable with them and even accepted them without any alterations.

  “As Jakesch et al. (2023)1 state ‘With the emergence of large language models that produce human-like language, interactions with technology may influence not only behavior but also opinions: when language models produce some views more often than others, they may persuade their users.’”

• This study on AI’s impact on critical thinking found that workers’ self-reported critical thinking was significantly reduced when using AI.

  “In the majority of examples, knowledge workers perceive decreased effort for cognitive activities associated with critical thinking when using GenAI compared to not using one — examples that were reported as ‘much less effort’ or ‘less effort’ comprise 72% in Knowledge, 79% in Comprehension, 69% in Application, 72% in Analysis, 76% in Synthesis, and 55% in Evaluation dataset (See Figure 2). Moreover, knowledge workers tend to perceive that GenAI reduces the effort for cognitive activities associated with critical thinking when they have greater confidence in AI doing the tasks and possess higher overall trust in GenAI.”

  The study’s authors, once again, perceive AI as inherently good (not just neutral), and are interested in the ways in which the cognitive tasks of the human workers shifted during AI usage. Something that was interesting to note was that the workers’ mental energy was focused almost entirely on verifying data and babysitting the machine. This, to my mind, leaves little room for actual critical thinking.

• This study examined the incredible ease with which AI could be used to influence users’ political opinions.

• This analysis article presented the possible direct link between AI usage — particularly the use of AI chatbots — and cognitive decline. The technology and observations are all too new to perform actual scientific studies, so the purpose of the article is to propose (rather urgently) a closer scientific examination of the links the authors were reporting.

• This paper from 2024 assesses the worrying tendency of AI to lie to its users.

  “A more speculative risk from deception concerns human enfeeblement. As AI systems are incorporated into our daily lives at greater rates, we will increasingly allow them to make more decisions. If AI systems are expert sycophants, human users may be more likely to defer to them in decisions and may be less likely to challenge them; see Gordon2 and Wayne et al.3 for relevant research in psychology. AIs that are unwilling to be the bearers of bad news in this way may be more likely to create dulled, compliant human users.”

• This paper, also from 2024, is similar in that it examines alignment faking in LLMs

• This questionnaire survey conducted at the Lingnan University in Hong Kong found that a reliance on AI was having a negative effect on students, despite the fact that it was improving their work efficiency.

  “The study found that, on the one hand, AI tools can significantly improve students’ academic writing efficiency. On the other hand, students’ frequent use of AI tools may cause their blind dependence on them, which triggers a series of problems such as academic self-discipline, weakening of students’ thinking, and digital ethics.”

• This fascinating study conducted in 2024 highlighted the ways in which reliance on AI for writing effectively weakens and then kills the writing skills in the human. There are several quotes from the students’ self-assessments. Here are some:

  “‘[…] I think I’m starting to depend on it too much. I do not really think through my ideas as much because Jenny AI does it all so fast. It’s nice, but I feel like my own thinking isn’t as strong anymore […].’ (Student A)”

  and

  “‘I use GPT a lot […], but now I feel like I rely on it too much. When I have to come up with my own ideas, I get stuck. GPT does the thinking for me, and I am not as confident without it.’ (Student D)”

  and

  “‘[…] GPT is great for generating ideas when I am stuck, but I feel like it has taken over my brainstorming process. It is making me less confident in my creativity [...]’ (Student N)”

  and

  “‘[…] Jasper helps me make my writing sound professional, but I feel like it’s taken away some of my creativity […] I am worried that I’m losing my personal style. I used to enjoy coming up with my own sentences, but now I just accept whatever Jasper suggests […].’ (Student J)”

  and

  “‘[…] Grammarly has boosted my confidence with writing […] I do not pay as much attention to the rules because I know Grammarly will fix it. It’s like I’m forgetting the basics […].’ (Student B)”

II. AI is Stupid, Actually

• This illuminating tidbit reveals that AI’s number one source for information is Reddit. Number two? Wikipedia.

• This article from The Atlantic talks about the rise of AI search engines. It gets into a factor having to do with “cognitive load”, that is, the web search is supposed to be a little difficult for the human. There’s supposed to friction on the road to acquiring information. That’s what drives knowledge acquisition and also aids in knowledge retention and curiosity. It also mentions another important set of factors: one, sometimes AI will just make stuff up. And two, the whole point of the AI search engine is to avoid having to verify data, so even though information is often wrong or even biased, people are not going to be inclined to double-check anything.

• This article in Futurism reports on the noticed drop in AI usage over summer. Further analysis suggests that AI was used on a massive scale to cheat on homework. An interesting thought considering everything we’re learning about how stupid AI actually is. A chilling thought considering the fact that this means, essentially, that AI is teaching children, even if it is on the sly.

• This article in Rolling Stone reports that AI fabricates academic papers. The users then fail to verify the data provided by the AI and cite the non-existent academic papers in their own work.

  “Since LLMs have become commonplace tools, academics have warned that they threaten to undermine our grasp on data by flooding the zone with fraudulent content. The psychologist and cognitive scientist Iris van Rooij has argued that the emergence of AI ‘slop’ across scholarly resources portends nothing less than ‘the destruction of knowledge.’”

• This article in The Guardian details a case in which a lawyer allowed ChatGPT to write a brief he filed. This brief was found to contain, among other things, references to cases that didn’t exist.

  “According to [Richard] Bednar and his attorney, an ‘unlicensed law clerk’ wrote up the brief and Bednar did not ‘independently check the accuracy’ before he made the filing.”

• There are countless compilations on Youtube of AI’s profound inability to grammar or even to English. But Matt Rose’s are my favorite. Here are links to a couple. Be warned, you will laugh so hard you’ll experience a cardiac event. And then you’ll remember that AI is used by professionals everywhere and you’ll cry.

  • AI Text Summaries are Hilariously Dehumanizing

  • Grammarly Being Goodn't

III. The Dangers of Social Media

Research in these areas tends to fall into one of my personal pet peeves: conflating the Internet with social media. The internet, to my mind, is its own thing, and a very good thing. Social media is a thing on the internet. I define as social media anything that has an infinite scroll and a feed with which the user can interact by liking, commenting, etc. So, in all fairness, a huge amount of the standard internet has been gradually social-media-ified. Which makes the data even more chilling.

• This 2024 study found that people who develop what they referred to as “Problematic Usage of the Internet” or PUI have also been associated with gray matter structural brain abnormalities. That is, the research and analysis suggests that “problematic internet usage” actually alters the physical brain.

• This 2023 study examined the neuropsychological deficits which occur in multiple types of “disordered screen use” including social media, smartphone addiction, video game addiction, etc. They noted that there was little difference in the results when social media was excluded from the analysis. Among their findings were emotional issues, psychological issues, neurodevelopmental issues, and even physical issues.
  The study did fall into the common error of lumping users together with those who were addicted (It’s my opinion that all levels of social media usage are problematic, though). It is common for people — especially older generations who did not grow up with video games — to assume that any video game usage, even reasonable, limited usage, is addiction. Just as it is common for our generation to assume that all internet usage is social media usage.
  But just like non-social media internet usage, video games are neutral and even have positive effects. The most interesting part of the study, however, had to do with the neurological issues emerging in social media addiction.

  “Temporal neuroimaging studies investigating the effects of disordered screen use behaviours, including the excessive and problematic use of social media and smartphones, demonstrate the emergence of atypical neural cue reactivity, aberrant activity (He et al., 2018; Horvath et al., 2020; Schmitgen et al., 2020; Seo et al., 2020), and altered neural synchronisation (Park et al., 2017; Youh et al., 2017). These features are seen to persist despite pharmacological treatment.”

• This 2022 study is three studies in one on what was, at the time, the relatively new idea of “doomscrolling” and the enormously negative effect it has on the user. This study did an excellent job proving the link between these mental health factors and the act of doomscrolling.

Most talk about doomscrolling and the negative impact it has on a person tends to wrap up with “tips for limiting your social media time”.

You need to stop using all social media. Right now. It’s killing your brain. All social media usage devolves into doomscrolling. All doomscrolling is harmful. And meanwhile, you gain nothing. If you have to have social media for work or a business, then only use it for work or business. Never post anything personal and never scroll. Never.

* And for those of you still posting photos of your children on social media, an investigative resource distributed to law enforcement by the FBI in the 1980s reported that pedophiles horde any and all photos of children, they don’t even have to be pornographic. They will cut pictures out of newsletters, magazines, medical articles, even clothing catalogs. In current year, social media is Candyland for pedophiles. Please think twice before posting photos of your children online.

IV. Difficulty is Good for You

I’m always surprised at how many serious academic studies I find that insist that mental effort is bad for you. This in depth meta-study, for instance, came to this conclusion after analyzing a huge number of surveys in which workers of a variety of types completed tasks that required mental effort. Many of these workers reported being distressed of uncomfortable as a result of the mental effort. Thus, the meta-study concluded, mental effort is inherently aversive. You shouldn’t need me to explain how modern society has become increasingly allergic to hard work. There are a number of factors at work here (and yes, the fact that hard jobs are rarely enough to support oneself or one’s family is definitely one of them), but I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that working hard, despite the reward or outcome, is extremely undesirable in current year. This meta-study shows me that that attitude — whatever the cause — is worryingly widespread.

Nevertheless, hard work and mental effort are actually psychologically and cognitively good for you. Our childish modern society needs to remember that we do not need our hands held in order to feel good. And that “feeling good” is never a good enough goal — but is almost always a major outcome — in completing a difficult task.

We’re adults. Sometimes we just have to roll our sleeves up and get the job done. Incredibly, doing that is often a reward in itself.

• The study from 2013 talks about the positive variety of stress, a thing referred to as “eustress”, a somewhat odd word coined in 1976.

  (Things like this, while helpful, suggest to me that society has become programmed to aggressively avoid difficulty, to the point that we have to gaslight ourselves into finding positive types of hardship, like “eustress” in order to allow our minds to accept it.)

• Like the above, the concept of “desirable difficulties” also seems to have been engineered to help people trick themselves into allowing the presence of hardship. Because, crucially, difficulty aids in learning, as is summarized in this brief chapter.

• This 2018 study analyzed the impact of imposed constraints on creativity. It was found that constraints fostered creativity, especially in problem-solving. It did highlight that the point in the process at which the constraints were identified helped the creative process, suggesting that not only is difficulty beneficial, but that an open, focused approach to those difficulties (rather that resisting or ignoring them) helps immensely.

• This 2024 study assessed what is called NFC, or need for cognition. That is, the human mind needs “effortful” mental labor.

  “Higher NFC was found to be associated with lower neuroticism, anxiety, negative affect, burnout, public self-consciousness, and depression and with higher positive affect, private self-consciousness, and satisfaction...”

V. For the Curious: Some Cautionary Notes on Television

• This brief article refers to a CIA memo that mentions an interest in researching the use of television to deliver subliminal messages to viewers.

  “A CIA memo dated November 21, 1955, notes how ‘psychologically the general lowering of consciousness during the picture facilitates the phenomenon of identification and suggestion as in hypnosis.’”

  • Related: This declassified CIA report on MKULTRA Subproject No. 83 talks about subliminal messaging in general.

• This declassified CIA report, “The Operational Potential of Subliminal Perception” by Richard Gafford speaks at length about the possibility of using various means — including film and television — to impart certain subliminal messages in the passive minds of viewers

  “The operational potential of other techniques for stimulating a person to take a specific controlled action without his being aware of the stimulus, or the source of stimulation, has in the past caught the attention of imaginative intelligence officers. Interest in the operational potential of subliminal perception has precedent in serious consideration of the techniques of hypnosis, extrasensory perception, and various forms of conditioning. By each of these techniques, it has been demonstrated, certain individuals can at certain times and under certain circumstances be influenced to act abnormally without awareness of the influence or at least without antagonism.”

• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman
  This book, originally published in 2005, speaks specifically of the way television has conditioned mankind to expect entertainment. Even our information must take the form of entertainment. Which is worth remembering when we look at all those studies on AI usage that talk about how much more fun it is to complete tasks when using AI.

  (the above link is an affiliate link)

  (Here’s a link to read the entire book on archive.org)

  From the forward:

  “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

  This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

  and

  “Obviously, my point of view is that the four-hundred-year imperial dominance of typography was of far greater benefit than deficit. Most of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth and information. I will try to demonstrate that as typography moves to the periphery of our culture and television takes its place at the center, the seriousness, clarity and, above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines.”

• This 2013 study looks at the negative effects of television viewing on children. The study attempted to identify the impact television has on the actual brain structure, which is frustratingly difficult to pinpoint.

  “Many cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have reported deleterious effects of television (TV) viewing on the cognitive abilities, attention, behaviors, and academic performance of children4 5 6. Longer TV viewing was associated with lower intelligence quotient (IQ) and reading grades in a cross-sectional study7. However, the longitudinal effects of TV viewing on Full Scale IQ (FSIQ) are less clear8. In an intervention study, restricting children’s TV viewing for a short period improved their cognitive abilities9 and another longitudinal study showed that TV viewing affected attention10, which in turn is correlated with a wide range of cognitive performances11. Finally, longitudinal studies have shown that TV viewing has detrimental effects on verbal abilities including verbal working memory12.”

  and

  “However, despite numerous related psychological and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of brain activities in children watching certain content, the effects of TV viewing on brain structures in children are unknown.”

• This 2025 study looks at the differences in neurocognition and brain function in people who read versus people who watch television.

  “Although the causal relationships between reading, television viewing, cognition, and brain structure cannot be determined from a cross-sectional study, these findings suggest that regular reading is associated with higher cognitive function and regionally selective cortical area expansion, while television viewing has much smaller opposing associations with these same processes involving different cortical regions.”

• This study examines the difference in imagination between readers and those watching visual media. And this article from the University of York summarizes the study quite well for those who might be short on time.

  “Dr Suggate, from the University of York’s Department of Education, said: ‘We found that those who had been watching film clips had slightly impaired imagery for 25 seconds compared to those who had just been reading, and that this did not change depending on whether they had seen fast-moving or slow-moving images on screen.

  “‘In reality this is a very small time delay, but if you look at what this means over a longer period of time - days or years of consistently consuming images on screen - then we can see that this is actually a significant impact on the brain’s ability to mentally visualise and feel.’”

V. Miscellaneous

• The interview with Edward Snowden from 2013 in which he expresses his fear that his revelations would change nothing.

• This is the 2003 study explaining how much of the average person’s real world framework is made up of false reality.

• And for those who might be curious, this is the poor, innocent example medical article I randomly mentioned in the video: Anti-CD38 monoclonal antibody CM313 for primary immune thrombocytopenia

This article and list is meant to act as a companion piece to my Youtube video.

An Important Note

I suspect many who watch my video and read through this list of resources might arrive at the end with the impression that I want to “ban” or “censor” AO3 and other fan fiction sites.

THIS IS NOT TRUE. I have not said this and I will not say this because I don’t hold that opinion in any way.

I believe that adult human beings are obligated to maintain the health of their own minds themselves. It is every person’s responsibility to guard his or her own mental and moral health. I believe that it is right and prudent to warn adult human beings that some things out there might cause them harm, physically, mentally, emotionally, or morally. My aim with my video and this list is to do just that: warn adults. What those adults do with that warning is up to them.

That said, anything having to do with sexualizing a child, or a character meant to look like a child despite being canonically an adult, is repugnant, evil, and should absolutely be stricken from the internet. Producing such works is actually illegal,1 but is rarely prosecuted. People have been convicted for possessing sexual drawings of children in an anime style and for other “artwork” of this nature, particularly if the work is obscene. However convictions for text-only work are harder to obtain. It is, nevertheless, not protected by the First Amendment — as is often claimed, particularly in AO3’s ToS — especially if it is obscene.

When I was in my twenties, I was absolutely one of those sensitive, aesthetically-minded young women who was drawn to the indulgent escapism of literature and storytelling across mediums. I absorbed fiction and books and loved finding places online where, ostensibly, similar-minded people tended to gather. My time in these spaces was on the very edge of a cultural transition that probably wasn’t noticed except by those accidentally in unique positions, such as myself. As I tended to keep to myself, I was less immersed in these communities and saw for myself as they shifted under and around me. Literary communities such as those on tumblr dot com gradually, then suddenly, slipped into smut and “shipping” and then became entirely pornographic. The language with which these communities interacted with any and all media was that of fan fiction. A new story emerged in the world and it was immediately run through the fan fiction engine and only in that form was it ingested. In time I saw this spread elsewhere.

A lot of this was clearly in an effort by the audiences to see themselves mirrored in the work. Characters had to be made gay or queer or trans in order for the gay, queer, or trans community to identify with them. Characters were also often race or gender swapped for the same reason. Resistance to this was often met with the predictable cries of “[blank]-phobia!” Because if the character — in its altered, fan fiction form — now mirrored the creator, and thus was, to some degree, the creator, having a problem with that reimagined character was the exact same as having a problem with the creator, or anyone else who identified with the character. Every single aspect of which, by the way, is fundamentally contrary to literary integrity.

Characters also had to be made to be in love with other specific characters for reasons having to do with representation or sexual and emotional satisfaction.

Once it was clear that no one had any interest in engaging with canon stories for what they were, I left these spaces and these communities, if I could ever really be said to have been “in” them. As I saw it, I was in a lovely literary neck of the woods and then I looked up one day and realized that my neighborhood had become gentrified by fan fiction, so I left. Nevertheless, my time there and my constant awareness of those parts of that world that overlapped with my own (the literary world, whatever that means in these days), has allowed me to observe certain repeated patterns. And none are more obvious and worrying than the growing power and prevalence of fan fiction in the literary world.

I’ll leave it to my video to address these issues and my observations in that regard. But for those of you who want to educate yourself further or see for yourself the various things I touch on in the video, here’s a (somewhat disturbing) list of resources. Gird your loins and go with God.

AO3, or Archive of Our Own

The primary internet home of most fanfiction was created almost entirely in response to numerous clumsy efforts by the hosts of sites like LiveJournal and FanFiction.net to cleanse their spaces of material that crossed into taboo (e.g. incest) or illegal (e.g. child porn) territory. This was done mainly because of external pressure from groups that were trying to curtail the growing prevalence of exploitative material on the internet. I seriously doubt those original host sites cared much about the content users posted on their sites, but the pressure was significant. Because of this pressure — and their ideological indifference — these purges were, as I said, clumsy. Swathes of content were unceremoniously deleted, including sites dedicated to actual survivors of abuse. Then they would quietly allow the forbidden again for a while, then the pressure would come again and they would delete another huge batch. This, combined with some difficult to navigate efforts on the part of large media companies to retake control of fan fiction, led the community to create their own fan-run space. That became Archive of Our Own, or AO3. This site is run by a non-profit with a board of directors and subsists on donations from users. It has been in existence for over fifteen years.

Because the main, original impetus of its creation was “censorship”, as they called it, this is the guiding principle of AO3’s content policy, what they call “maximum inclusiveness.” Literally nothing, nothing is disallowed. If you go to, for instance, the various fan fiction subreddits and read conversations about taboo topics or disturbing tags, you’ll find that the only acceptable opinion in the community is that absolutely nothing can be off-limits. To even suggest that a conversation on the topic ought to be had will cause a person to be shunned and condemned.

Here is a link to the official website of the Organization for Transformative Works, or OTW, the parent non-profit that owns Archive of Our Own, or AO3.

Here is a link to AO3, though I do not recommend browsing casually.

Here is a link to OTW’s journal Transformative Works and Cultures, which features academic articles, of a sort, relevant to topics important to the fanfiction community. This is almost exclusively issues of identity and representation. Some article titles:

• “Disordered eating, disordered reading: Wintergirls and the fannish practices of pro-ana”

• “‘I wish my life was like this’: Queer identity work in BL fandom”

• “Fan perspectives of queer representation in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow on Tumblr and AO3”

• “Self-identification in Malaysian cosplay”

You get the idea.

I. The Self-Indulgence of Fan fiction

I.a. The Terminal Cancer of Representation and Identity

The idea that only people of certain identities can write stories featuring those types of characters or themes is sometimes called “Own Voice” or even “identity gatekeeping”.

There are several conversations on the fan fiction and AO3 subreddits that illuminate the community attitude towards this issue. And while many seem to think that broad-spectrum identity gatekeeping is bad, they do not ever recognize the fundamental issue. That is, at their core, the fan fiction community still believes that representation and identification is of paramount importance and so even when they caution against too much identity gatekeeping, they still advocate for the spirit of the issue. Take this reply, from this long subreddit conversation on the topic.

“There’s a difference between saying someone can’t write something and someone needing sensitivity readers before they publish a work.

For instance, if I was going to write a trans character, I might want to contact someone who is actually trans and get their perspective on certain things before I publish the work. And if this was a “real” publication, like for money and big wig publishers, and not fan fiction, I hope that that would be almost the norm (although it’s sadly not). Fan fiction is a bit different because it’s not something you get paid for or can pay someone for their time to read over your work and make sure it’s an accurate description and portrayal of their life.

There’s a big push towards diversity in media which is great! I love seeing all of these different ideas and identities come to life in front of me, but people have a tendency to get mad when they don’t go the way they plan for them to.

Which leads to this strange world where you potentially have to out yourself or your mental illnesses or race or even disabilities in order to be qualified to write these stories. Am I, a bisexual women of mixed heritage, allowed to write stories about people who don’t look like me? Sure, that’s fine. But the second I want to write about people who look and sound and act like me I’m met with resistance, people wanting proof that I’m Mexican/Native American or how many women have I dated?

Gate keeping can only hurt us in the end. If I hadn’t been allowed to write the fanfics that I did, I never would’ve been able to accept my own sexuality. If we restrict our own stories even more, then we’re only reducing the amount of them out there. We can weed out the bad ones (the ones with terrible representation or stereotypes), but we can’t put more stories out there if everyone’s afraid to write them.

In this fan fiction subreddit conversation a writer spoke about getting hate mail and death threats for making a canonically gay character straight. The post was mass reported and then locked. But it did receive a few illuminating replies:

“The thing is, straight characters are everywhere. They’re the default. If a character in any given media is not, specifically shown to not be straight, it’s assumed they are. LGBT+ people are constantly forced to accept this whenever they consume media, because actual, canon queer characters are so incredibly rare.

So if a writer (and straight writers do this too; I’m one of them), take a canonically straight (and again, if they’re not stated as not straight they’re considered straight) and put them into a same-sex relationship, there are literally handfuls of other, canonically straight characters still in the work of fiction. It’s not a big deal. However, if someone turns the most likely single queer character of the work straight, it’s a huge deal, because there isn’t anyone else like them.

It’s the same reason why killing of a character of color hurts so much worse than killing off a white character. Chances are the COC was the only one, and there’s always going to be another white character. There’s always going to be another straight character, too.

When that one, single character who is actually like you is taken away, even if it’s in fanfiction, it hurts.”

and

“In a completely objective, rational, unemotional world - you are allowed to change any character into any sexuality or gender that you want to.

In reality - people are very protective of the few characters that represent the minority they identify with.

You can write whatever you wish. People can hate whatever they want. I’d turn off the comments or moderate them if I were you. And I really hope you tagged for it.”

and

“I don’t think you deserved hate mail or death threats for writing a gay character as straight, but it is a gauche thing to do. Flipping a gay character to straight is much different than flipping a straight character to gay.

I’m not religious, but I think the parable of the ‘Rich Man and the Ewe’ offers an example:

“The rich man owned vast herds of sheep, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. Now a traveler came to the rich man, who refrained from taking one of his own sheep to prepare for the traveler. Instead, he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for his guest.”

When you take a canon character that represents a marginalized group (not just gay, but could be a character who’s a POC, a Jewish character etc) and flip it to what is most common and conventional (be that straight or white or Christian), you are devouring their ewe lamb.”

This interesting conversation on a similar topic from three years ago highlights a worrying trend: according to several replies, the number of these occurrences of identity outrage had already been going up.

This AO3 post contains the “rules” (yes, rules) for “cis” people who want to write trans characters.

and so on, there are guides to writing smut from various sexual identity perspectives, conversations about gay representation, COC (character of color, apparently) representation, and so on. Representation is at the forefront of almost any semi-serious discussion about fanfiction. Whether that’s identity representation, as in gender, sexuality, or race, or fetish representation, as in various kinks represented “properly”.

• Articles about writers who were attacked or cancelled for “doing representation wrong”, somehow. Many of whom pulled their books themselves and offered apologies.

  • Sparrow and Vine by Sophie Lark was pulled when it was criticized for characters saying lines of dialogue that were potentially racist or even *gasp* expressing admiration for Elon Musk’s business success.

    “In a statement posted on Instagram on Monday, Lark said she was pausing the series and planned to revise it ‘to ensure that my work doesn’t contribute to harm.’”

  • Sensitivity reader turned writer Kosoko Jackson’s A Place for Wolves was pulled due to the novel’s “problematic representation of the Kosovo War, genocide, and Muslim characters”. As Kosoko Jackson is gay and the book features two gay boys falling in love in a war zone, it was presented as a #OwnVoices novel.

  • Amélie Wen Zhao’s Blood Heir was famously pulled because she wasn’t, apparently, allowed to talk about slavery, as she wasn’t of African slave descent. Zhao herself pulled her book, buckling to online pressure.

    “‘How is nobody mentioning the anti-blackness and blatant bigotry in this book?’ one reader wrote on Goodreads. ‘This book is about slavery, a false oppression narrative that equates having legitimately dangerous magical powers that kill people with being an oppressed minority, like a person of color. This whole story is absolutely repulsive.’”

  • Keira Drake's The Continent was immediately condemned all over the internet after advance copies were sent out. Why? For featuring stereotype indigenous characters (??) and other kinds of perceived sins against representation. She also caved and said “it’s so true”. She then enlisted sensitivity readers and rewrote the book. This article shows old passages alongside the revised version. Very interesting.

  • Laura Moriarty, however, refused to cave when the internet decided her book American Heart was unacceptable for x-y-z reasons. This article details the online bullying other reviewers received to change their positive reviews in light of “the controversy”.
    Her response? “Fear is the quickest path to obedience.”

• It’s my belief that cancel culture in literature is in large part due to the growing prevalence of fan fiction community rules in the real world.

  • An article about cancel culture in the book industry in general.

    “Cancel culture feeds on the public’s perception of reputation. Who do you know, what is your identity? Combined with the growth of corporate culture - and some of these publishers are now vast behemoths - reputation and brand values are everything.”

    and

    “After her novel American Dirt, about an illegal Mexican migrant, was published in 2019, Jeanine Cummins was accused of cultural appropriation because she is not Mexican, and of filling the novel with stereotypes. Violent threats caused her publishers to cancel a book tour, but Cummins now says her biggest regret was writing the ‘clumsy’ author’s note justifying her reasons for writing it. ‘But that just served to open the door for people to make their criticisms extremely personal instead of about the book,’ she says.”

  • A 15-year-old article about The Help by Kathyrn Stockett which was maligned in its day because Stockett was a white woman writing the voices of black women.

  • An interview with Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin among other books. Shriver had made a bold and aggressive stance against the absurd insistence on identity politics in literature, which caused an enormous uproar.

    “‘The whole notion of re-enfencing (sic) ourselves into little groups, first off, encourages pigeonholing. It means that we don’t read books about people who are different; we just read books about people who are just like us. And we don’t experience the empathy that you’re recommending to me. And we all the more think of each other in terms of membership of a collective. And I don’t think that’s in the interest of any minority group. Why would they want that? And why do they want us to keep our hands off their culture and therefore ignore them? The exchange of cultural practices and ideas—even costume—is fruitful! It’s in the interest of those groups—for us to be able to exchange our experience.’”

    Interestingly, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who walked out of Shriver’s speech on the topic, was so triggered that she penned an essay which she later removed. However, you can still view it on the Wayback Machine here. Probably the most telling display of what I’m talking about

    “The kind of disrespect for others infused in Lionel Shriver’s keynote is […] the reason our First Peoples are still fighting for recognition, and it’s the reason we continue to stomach offshore immigration prisons. It’s the kind of attitude that lays the foundation for prejudice, for hate, for genocide.”

    Abdel-Magied is explicitly stating that a speech criticizing the concept of literary cultural appropriation facilitates genocide.

    This is precisely the attitude towards storytelling that is nurtured by fan fiction communities.

    The more cultural power fan fiction writers and their communities gain, the more widespread and prevalent these attitudes and policies will become.

• This interesting article talks about the phenomenon of “shipping”. In particular it touches on what happens when shipping becomes linked to identity and then also to ideology. Tellingly, this article, while unbiased towards shipping, is deeply critical of the “power imbalance” between writers and fans. It criticizes the writers of Supernatural for disregarding fan desires, while fans, meanwhile, were creating an entire parallel narrative that was reliant on, but separate from, the canon. This is also the fruits of fan fiction: fans whose identities aren’t served — even just in the ships they believe to be canon — perceive that they are being harmed in some way by the original storytellers. Which is to say, only the fans, and fan fiction writers in particular, have any right to make interpretations about stories. Disrespecting these interpretations is now deemed wrong. Specifically because of the growing influence of fan fiction.

• This is the article in which the author talks about the earlier drafts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian with information about how to view the early drafts yourself, if you get a chance.

I.b. Whump

That odd tumblr phenomenon. I discovered this in a really strange way. I had been watching the rather excellent British/American series Strike Back with my husband for some time (I highly recommend everything from season 2 on, even the seasons after they changed the cast. It was pretty unnecessarily explicit — though not as bad as, say, Game of Thrones — but otherwise a great show with great storytelling). At the time there was a fascinating mini-arc in one season in which one of the main characters got hit with a nearly lethal dose of some kind of nerve agent, but chose to complete the mission instead of getting treatment. Sacrificing his life, potentially, to save millions. I attempted to “engage with the community”, as one does, about this narrative theme and found my posts rather popular with the whump crowd. To which I replied, “What is whump?” Thus my eyes were opened, and I spent the next several months trying to puzzle out this phenomenon.

I did notice, rather crucially, that the core theme there, the ethical and moral heroism of the character’s choice, was of no interest. What mattered was the aesthetics of the thing, the image of the (random) strong, handsome man brought low by poison. Which I found terribly disappointing.

• This fanlore site talks about the history of whump and explains various aspects of the terminology.

• This collection of tumblr posts attempts to define various community-important reasons for whump-attraction.

• Here is a link to the “Whumpepedia”, the public spreadsheet that features over 15,000 entries across mediums

• Here is a link to a similar, but less comprehensive, list for Asian media with only about 1100 entries.

• Here is a tumblr directory of over 500 tumblr blogs dedicated to whump.

• Here is one tumblr blog focusing on whump in Asian media. You can scroll through a get a pretty good feel for the whole thing

• Here is a tumblr blog devoted exclusively to Supernatural whump

I.c. The Nature of the Community

Here I will provide some links to wacky kerfuffles that have arisen in the world of fan fiction, to give you an idea of the kinds of things that are important, controversial, and worth drama. Some of this is actually a little entertaining.

• A fairly comprehensive write-up of the insane situation that emerged when a woman named Tiffany, who was Chinese, ran for a position on the OTW board of directors and mentioned, among other things, that something ought to be done to better regulate the tagging of controversial material (such as explicit stories involving children). Note: she didn’t say she wanted to remove these stories, she just wanted to find a way to address concerns that it was sullying the reputation of fan fiction communities.

  • Among the highlights: She was accused of being a plant by the Chinese government bent on… stopping AO3 from hosting child porn?

• The HIV+ high school AU/cannibal mermaid Hamilton fanfiction incident

  • (Yes. You read that right.) This one is a wild ride from start to finish, but it does a great job highlighting the insanity that ensues when identity, representation, and emotion become the guiding principles of storytelling.

• The Cassandra Clare Plagiarism Debacle

  • For those who don’t know (I didn’t when I first heard about this several years ago), Cassandra Clare is currently a bestselling writer most famous for her Mortal Instruments series, which is a reworking of her Harry Potter fan fiction.

  • This write-up is probably more comprehensive than it needs to be — with over thirty citations — but it places the social world of fan fiction in dramatic relief.

• The MsScribe saga

  • In which a fan fiction writer (Harry Potter) created multiple fake identities to both bully and praise herself and also created multiple fake, attention-seeking incidents such as a life-threatening illness, a stalking, etc. and was eventually caught.

  • The above write-up includes a brief prelude touching on the “Ship Wars” which were intense internet battles between groups that shipped specific Harry Potter characters in specific ways. If you were to look further into this whole thing you’d find stories about spies, attacks, police involvement, etc.

• Andy Blake a.k.a “Thanfiction”

  • This person was responsible for some of the most mentally-ill events in the early eras of current fan fiction. I can’t even begin to do this whole thing justice. There were at least two honest-to-goodness cults. There was even a murder.

• Snapewives

  • I’m still not completely convinced this was real. But, yes, at some point in recent fan fiction history there was a faction of female Harry Potter fans / fan fiction writers who started a cult built around the belief that everything in Harry Potter was real, actually. And that J.K. Rowling had been channeling the (very real) Severus Snape who dictated the books. Severus Snape, by the way, is an immortal deity, and they both worship him and are engaged in romantic relationships with him. (This might still exist.)

• The Untamed Xiao Zhan / Wang Yibo China insanity is detailed in the section below on BL (boys love).

II. The Smut-pocalypse

II.a. The Depths of Fan fiction

This subsection is pretty disturbing. I don’t recommend digging into this too much unless you want to ruin your day. The point of this section is to highlight for those who don’t know just how deep and wide and black the pit of fan fiction is. I know there are many people out there who have those favorite “good” fan fiction stories which are not horrifically warped and awful. I’m aware. I still argue that such works in these days are fundamentally restrained by virtue of being fan fiction, but I understand and am aware that some fan fiction isn’t as bad as what I have listed here.

• This horrible cursed link that you SHOULD NOT click will take you to the “dead dove do not eat” tag on AO3, if you wanted to see that garbage for yourself. I must warn you, though: you definitely do not want to see that garbage for yourself. Needless to say, it’s all sexual.

• The following list will be provided to show you the kind of content that is protected on AO3. I didn’t provide links because it’s horrendous. Take my word for it, you don’t want to see/read it.

  There have been various moments in the 17-year history of the site when people have tried to “do something” about the proliferation of disturbing and pedophilic content that seems to collect in all corners of AO3. This has always met with extreme resistance. Coming out and saying openly “this stuff should be removed and banned” is one of the mortal sins of fanfiction, labeled as a kind of oppression, and, obviously, censoring. But even just suggesting that more robust tagging systems ought to be used is enough to get a person removed from consideration for a board position at OTW, as mentioned above. To say that fan fiction communities in general and AO3 in particular protect and facilitate the production and spread of pedophilia material is not an unfair statement.

  • Age Difference tag — over 138,000 works

  • Underage Sex tag — over 369,000 works

  • Father/Son Incest tag — over 10,000 works, the top one of which has over 1.5 million hits and is, naturally, Harry Potter

  • Pedophilia tag — a tag with over 14,000 titles. One of the sickest things I’ve seen in a while, the top title has over a million hits.

  • Father/Daughter “Relationship” tag — another soul-killer. Over 23,000 titles, the top one of which, again, has over a million hits.

  • Sibling Incest tag — over 89,000 titles, the top five of which have over a million hits

  • Teacher/Student tag — this one has over 31,000 titles. The third most popular one, with over a million hits, features the tag “consensual underage sex”

  • “Extremely Underage” — over 7,700 works. You really, really do not want to know. My soul, at this point, was completely dead.

  • Mother-Daughter “Relationship” — over 14,000

  • Parent / Child Incest — over 32,500

  • Mother / Son “Relationship” — over 13,000

  • There are others, of course. Cannibalism kink, necrophilia, bestiality, various tags that include “in front of infant”, etc. But after a while I couldn’t bear to look at any more.

• Here’s an AO3 guide to writing bestiality.

• There is also a guide to writing vomitkink (yes, you read that right, no I won’t link it)

• *note: I’ve received many messages since making my jab at fan fiction in my video on romantasy and women’s fiction that insist that smut is not the only kind of fan fiction in existence. I addressed this issue in the current video, the fan fiction video, but to be clear: Smut and explicit content — particularly involving taboo themes like incest or even illegal themes like underage sex and straight-up pedophilia — is so important to fan fiction writers that its protection is 90 percent of the reason AO3 was created in the first place. Moreover, it is one of the most widely talked about “censorship” issues in the community.
  That being said, when talking about explicit fan fiction in particular, the sex scenes themselves are less the topic. What’s really, immensely disturbing is the depths of depravity which are not only on display, but which are hugely popular and proudly protected.

• In case you need any more proof that literary awards are no longer worth the paper they’re printed on, in 2019 the entirety of the Archive of Our Own was awarded a Hugo.

The Omegaverse
Something that sits right in between fan fiction and BL is a lovely little thing called the “omegaverse”. A lot of BL stories are set in the omegaverse and many standard fan fiction works — gay or not, it doesn’t seem to matter — also take place in the omegaverse. I have been told that this is distinct from furry-ism (shudder). But, I don’t know... it seems like a next door neighbor, or even a roommate. If you’re curious, here's an explainer that breaks down how it all works, including anatomically.
(This is where you’re getting males who get impregnated and gestate offspring somewhere in the anal canal. I think. Please don’t make me read it again.)

II.c. BL (Boys love)

As I said in my video, there are stories with gay characters, and then there’s BL. These are pretty distinct. Any discourse on this topic here or in my video is referring to BL specifically and its matching fan fiction iteration in which straight male characters are shipped together in erotic stories.

Often, when adapting a BL novel or manga for live action, a lot of the more typical BL elements are toned down to make the story more palatable. This includes, but is not limited to: huge age gaps or instances in which one of the men is drawn in a way to make him appear to be a child; tremendous amounts of sexual violence that is portrayed as erotic, normal, or tantalizing; taboo elements such as teacher / student relationships or varying degrees of incest; often very violent sex, and a lot of it; a frequent theme of the dominant male aggressively and forcibly convincing the submissive male, who is straight, that he might actually be gay, after which they become an affectionate couple. In short, elements that would be universally condemned and possibly even banned were the couples male / female.

• A note regarding the links between BL and gay erotic fan fiction

  • BL and gay shipping (particularly the shipping of male canon straight characters) fanfiction are two matching iterations of fanfiction indulgence unchecked. These particular themes in fanfiction — the BL specific themes and imagery and the more general insistence on shipping any two straight male characters together — indicate an absolute surrender to emotional (and sexual) indulgence. Usually sexual in nature, these particular stories and shipping habits feed a profoundly indulgent, often obsessive, emotional hunger. They also feed each other in an endless loop. This then, as we see in other areas, feeds mainstream literature and storytelling. The more taboo and controversial, the more the community fights for acceptance under various forms. For instance, several posts, articles, and even academic papers can be found online that attempt to legitimize the occurrence of the disturbingly young, girlish boys (many of whom are impregnated — see “omegaverse” above) in BL as being essential for trans representation. Meanwhile, the stats still show that the vast majority of audience members are female.

    “Emerging in the 1970s, one root of these works can be found in professional Japanese manga (comics) and the other in anglophone fan fiction. The internet has enabled mass engagement with popular culture across national, geographical, and cultural boundaries and the umbrella genre constituted by yaoi, boys’ love, and danmei may represent the largest erotic subculture by and for women.”

    It’s worth adding that many women online are critical of BL fans for insane fanaticism, degeneracy, or just fetishizing the actors and characters. Japan even has a derogatory name for female BL fans that translates literally to “rotten girl” or “rotten woman”. Fans of explicit BL comics and manga are basically the female equivalent of hentai fans. I’ve never personally seen any lolicon “art”, but from what I’ve heard, many BL comics and manga are basically just lolicon for women, as I will demonstrate below.

• The impact of BL and gay-shipping on the rest of media

  • BL and the popularity of gay shipping in fanfiction have led to a cultural environment in which male characters are almost always shipped together. Especially if, in canon stories, they are very close friends or siblings. This includes (but is not limited to): Sam and Dean Winchester in Supernatural, Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings, Gimli and Legolas in The Lord of the Rings, Professor Xavier and Magneto in X-Men, etc. If you wondered about the odd way in which Deadpool and Wolverine were being used to market Deadpool 2, that was an effort to feed the fanfiction beast. Writers and producers are either themselves from the fanfiction community, or they understand that that’s where their most hardcore fanbase is going to be and they know how to feed it.
    You see this in productions like Hannibal. When filming the final episode of the final season, Brian Fuller knew what he was doing:

    “Mads and Hugh, there were a lot of takes where they got very intimate, and lips were hovering over lips. I definitely had the footage to go there, because Mads and Hugh were so game. They called me and warned me: “We really went for it!” And then I saw the dailies, I thought there was a fine line from that #Hannigraham fan fiction motive to give the hardcore audience exactly what they want in terms of this actually being a homosexual relationship between these two men, and what is authentic for the characters in that final moment. I mean, it’s not ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ Mads isn’t gonna be spitting on his hand and getting to work.” (laughs)

    This is so prevalent that most straight male characters are now assumed to be canonically gay within fan fiction communities. An example would be the two male leads in the excellent Korean drama Beyond Evil. Or the two male leads in the excellent Chinese drama Under the Skin. (According to fans who had access to the latter show’s official Weibo, they were going to include a female love interest for one or both of these guys in the second season but the fan backlash was so severe that they didn’t. Because, after all, those two men are “canonically” gay in fan fiction fantasyland.)
    Here are some links to fan-edited Youtube videos that ship the straight male characters in the above dramas so you can see what I mean:
    (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) and (x) (x) (x) (x) (x)

  • On AO3, going solely by the tag system, there are roughly 3 million male/female ship stories, a little over 1 million lesbian ship stories, and over 6 million male/male ship stories. If LGBTQ representation was really that important, shouldn’t those latter two numbers be a little closer together? And given that the majority of fanfiction writers are female, perhaps the female/female number should actually be much higher. Why are the vast majority of fan fiction works written about male gay ships?

  • This article talks about how the K-pop-esque marketing attitude used to spread BL into the west has proven to be wildly successful (and just beginning).

    • And of course it has been successful, the road had already been paved by fan fiction. The Venn diagram of gay shipping fan fiction writers/readers and BL fans is almost a perfect circle.

• A note on the demographics of BL

  • The audience and writers are overwhelmingly female. In fact, in the east this genre is specifically marketed to women, not men.

    • The female readers of BL (also called danmei in China, yaoi in Japan, and Y in Thailand) are between 20-40 years old.

      • Other sources show that it starts younger

      • (Personal observation: a huge percentage of tumblr users who post a lot of BL content list their age as “30s”)

    • The writers of BL are by majority female.

    • Most of these readers and writers are heterosexual

      • In the west, a growing percentage of the female readership identifies as “queer”.

    • Membership in sites and forums that host danmei/BL/yaoi material is higher than you can possibly imagine.

    • It has been observed that BL is threatened in some western countries for no other reason than that country’s law against explicit material involving children. Which should tell you everything you need to know.

  • Source for the above numbers

• Examples of BL in the Wild:

  (You might not love clicking on some of these. If you have a VPN or the ability to use a private browser window so as not to ruin your ad algorithm, you might want to do so.)

  • The following links would probably be considered NSFW. While not quite explicit in themselves — unless you click on some of the titles — going to those links on, say, a work network might land you in hot water.
    Please note: for anything that is pornographically explicit, all that is required is that the reader click a button that says “I am 18 or older”. Though not all pornographic titles are gated in this way.

    • Here is a place where you can read translated BL novels. Go ahead and have a glance at the covers, and then have a look at the genres.

    • Here is a place where you can see popular translated BL comics (I did warn you). I personally tried to leaf through a few of these but lost the will to live pretty quickly. Some is mostly SFW (if still intensely emotional). But most of it is highly, highly, highly pornographic. (Typically, the less pornographic it is, the more mature the story.) And there is also, very often, the disturbing presence of a younger male character in the pairing who is not canonically underage but who nevertheless has the physique of a young boy. Three comics I tried to read drew the smaller male, when naked, with a boyish body and very little musculature, or as strikingly feminine and young. Another exaggerated the smaller male’s boyish youngness in the explicit scenes; he looked like he was ten, at the oldest. He was literally drawn smaller in those scenes than elsewhere in the manga. I can’t remember the name of this manga, but what I saw of it was among the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t look at anymore after that.

      

      All of these stories that I tried to read — particularly those set in modern times — which had two clearly adult men as the main characters also included wildly explicit flashback scenes to when one or both of the men were boys in high school having lots of sex with other boys. This also happens frequently in novels, for example The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, in which the main character traveled back in time to his teenage body and had multi-chapter sex with his teenage boyfriend.

    • Here is a link to a list of popular tags (← slightly NSFW link). Highlights: mpreg, animal characteristics, and tentacles.

    • An important component for most BL is that the men are very beautiful, even androgynously so. Even though the stories might include adult men and younger teenage boys (yeah), both had to be unusually beautiful. Including — often especially — the dominant male, who often had luscious, long hair and/or was described by other characters as almost feminine in beauty.

      

      
      

• The Nature of BL Fans and Fandom

  • Here is a link to a breakdown of the insane controversy that exploded after that Chinese BL fan fiction about Wang Yibo and Xiao Zhan broke the Chinese internet. This is a general, detailed timeline of events. It is the least biased accounting I could find on the English-language internet.

    • (*note: a lot of discourse on this topic tends to focus on perceived homophobia, which was, at most, one percent of what was going on, if that. At the risk of sounding like I’m somehow defending the CCP — I am not — the sexual orientation of China’s citizens is not nearly as big of an issue as the possible cultural influence of Japan. China and Japan have been at each other’s throats for centuries. They are enemies in the biblical sense, with mutual animosity that is unlikely to be resolved any time soon, if ever. Japan was the original breeding ground for BL, so China is resistant to most forms of BL as a genre for that reason above all else.)
      (*second note: You still see occasional stories about writers of erotic BL being arrested and getting significant prison time in China. This is often presented as an issue of homophobia. However a closer look always reveals that the offending work includes underage or underage-adjacent characters. Mostly, though, it comes down to money. As it usually does in communist regimes.)
      Given the fact that I have yet to come across a single gay erotic novel or manga which didn’t include some underage sex (or underage adjacent) graphically described or drawn, I’d assume that all/most of it has that as an essential component.

    • Here is a link to the original novel (in translation).

      

      “Original” is a bit of a misnomer. Due to restrictions on explicit content, the original original novel, which was published serially online in Chinese, had very little smut, if any. This one was fan translated and distributed across the internet. Many who read that version get very confused if you call The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation smutty. But later, the author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (a pseudonym) released additional chapters on her own blog/website to occur at various parts of the novel which were wildly explicit (a common practice among Chinese BL authors, given that the Chinese Webnovel site has strict restrictions on explicit material, regardless of the orientation of the characters). A lot of the explicit scenes in this novel, and other BL novels, feature a strange theme that attempts to make painful, violent, even forceful sex humorous. This includes, but is not limited to, one of the characters screaming “no!” or “stop!” in a way that is meant to be funny. You also see this in Japanese and Korean BL.
      The bottom line is that there are at least three versions of this novel floating around, one of which is fairly tame, one of which is pretty explicit, one of which is extremely explicit.

  • Here are several links to various aspects of the scandals that erupted around the live action production of the globally popular Thai BL KinnPorsche. I’m using this one as an example because its massive popularity made the scandals that surrounded it very big news in the world of eastern media, a great deal of which was translated into English.

    • (For anyone curious, this is the series in which one of the male characters, Porsche — the man below on the left — was drugged and nearly sexually assaulted, but then was saved by the man on the right, Kinn… who then took advantage of his drugged, high state to sleep with him himself. This was the beginning of their romantic relationship. The narrative of the drama treated this as both something deeply wrong and traumatizing, while simultaneously being something beautiful. This is common in BL in which even scenes which are treated as canon rape — such as one male lead being kidnapped and raped by a bad guy — are nevertheless described or drawn with erotic, titillating detail. I have been told that this is a seriously toned-down take on the original novel, which I have not read because at this point I’ve reached my limit.)

      

      • The writers of the original novels (a pair that was a straight female and a gay male collectively known as Daemi) proudly admitted to grooming behavior towards one of the support stars of the show who was 16 years old at the time.

        • Twitter video

      • A collection of videos and posts detailing inappropriate behavior by Daemi towards the cast

      • This comprehensive list of links and sources details a lot of the KinnPorsche novel writers’ deeply disturbing behavior, including harassment, creepy behavior (such as the male writer demanding an actor call him “mommy”), and one of the main male stars explicitly accusing the writers of sexually molesting him. Some of the included videos show behavior that would have been, had the genders been switched, criminal sexual harassment and even assault perpetrated by Daemi — especially the woman — against multiple male actors.

  • Here are some articles detailing the nature of the fan environment of BLs.

    • This article includes videos of an incident in which a large group of fans of a star from a Chinese BL called Revenged Love stormed his commercial flight on the runway and physically fought with the flight crew for access to him.

      • Revenged Love was an enormous hit when it aired and launched the stars into overnight superstardom. There are numerous news stories about stalkers terrorizing the stars. More than usual, probably, because the stars did not, at the time of their meteoric rise, have the experience nor the security to handle what they had stepped into.

    • This Facebook post by a Thai BL star includes security camera footage of a female stalker who had followed him to his home.

    • Another Facebook post that translates a Thai post by a BL actor (popular for presenting as a… young teenager) in which he shared multiple messages from a stalker who had gone full Stan and, due to the star’s lack of communication, was now threatening to kill him.

    • A post in which a talent agency announced it would be taking legal action against stalkers who had invaded a private gathering of the cast of KinnPorsche.

    • A note: BL, especially BL in Thailand, has its own set of rules that feeds into the obsessive nature of BL fans. For instance, the popular male pairings in dramas are then “paired” in “real life”. They make public appearances together with staged intimacy, casual social appearances together, and even host variety shows together. If one of them is caught dating someone else — especially a woman — he will literally be expected to issue an apology. Stars have received death threats for “breaking up” with the other person in their pairing.

      
      *note: I haven’t watched Netflix’s Heated Rivalry, but the book is insanely explicit. But, like I said, I can’t speak to the relationship dynamics present in the series. However, when I heard it announced I found myself wondering if this would be the gateway series that would allow for western BLs that will be more like the ones I’ve spoken about above…
      I heard a rumor that Heated Rivalry started as Steve/Bucky Avengers fanfiction. But I couldn’t confirm that.
      It’s worth noting that hockey romance, especially gay hockey smut, got its biggest boost (if not its start) on tumblr and AO3, where many would ship various real-life hockey players and then write wildly explicit smut about them.
      (x)
      (p.s. There is so much Max Verstappen fan fiction. When will they make the gay Formula 1 Netflix series, I wonder?)

      (I recently found out that Heated Rivalry is actually a Crave show and not a Netflix show.)

III. Fan Fiction Impacting the World

The tendrils of fan fiction have begun to spread like kudzu throughout all of popular culture, especially anything having to do with storytelling. This, in turn, is already affecting how the human mind is formed and directed.

III.a. Studies on the Ways Fiction Affects the Mind and Behavior

• This study talks about wishful identification and how audiences, particularly children and young adults, tend to identify and seek to emulate fictional characters of their gender (typically) whom they admire. Which is to say, if the character is written in such a way that the reader will admire them, they will also, then, begin to emulate them.

  “All of the definitions [of identification] involve a bond or connection between an individual and another person (or entity), such that the individual adopts traits, attitudes, or behaviors of the other person, or incorporates the other’s characteristics into his or her sense of self”.

• This study talks at length about the way our “real world knowledge” is often cultivated from fictional characters and situations. That is, the fiction we consume informs our perception of reality and how we behave in real world environments.

  “The conceptual framework that humans regard as their “real-world knowledge” largely consists of information mediated through stories (e.g., Cinderella, Momotarou the Peach Boy, news items), featuring people they have never met (e.g., politicians) or who do not exist (e.g., faked identities in chat boxes), and broadcasting events they did not witness (e.g., World War II) or that never happened (e.g., a virus hoax).”

• A 2024 article in Psychology discusses the observed ways in which fiction viewership impacts not just individuals but societies.

  “Researchers studied the impact of telenovelas on fertility in Brazil between 1979 and 1991 and found a significant relationship between a certain media group’s novelas (Globo) and birth rates. It was theorized that the decline in the birth rate in Brazil during this time was partly due to the characters depicted on screen who chose not to have children or delayed having children. The authors believe that the telenovelas played a significant role in a more than 50 percent decline in the birth rate in the country.”

• This article speaks specifically about the potentially harmful effects of binge-watching fiction. This addresses an interesting point: that the old style of weekly episodes allowed for a slower intake of the story, which in turn allowed the viewers to consider the details more carefully, as well as discuss them with their friends. Binge-watching places the focus on the punchiest moments in the whole season, particularly the finale.
  This might not translate specifically to the fanfiction reading habits, but it does speak to the overall potential of obsessive or addictive fiction intake to harm not just our daily lives, but also our ability to analyze stories and our ability to share them with friends. Storytelling, in the age of binge-watching, has become very solitary. Which, again, allows the individual viewer’s personal engagement and identification with the characters to become ever more important.

• This fascinating article talks about the cognitive nature of how we experience fictional stories. The impact this has on our opinions, behavior, attitudes, mindset, etc. cannot be overstated.

  “Narrative transportation is the sensation of being fully immersed in a story (Green & Brock, 2000). This sense of immersion diminishes our critical thinking through our ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ reducing the likelihood of counter-arguing or resisting persuasive messages. The more emotionally engaging the story, the more we are transported, the more susceptible we are to the story’s message, and the more it feels true.”

  and (the author was using the Netflix show Adolescence as an example):

  “When storytelling mirrors a parent’s biggest fears, the metaphors become truth-adjacent—emotionally real, even if not factually so. Psychologist Donald Polkinghorne (1988) defined this as ‘narrative knowing,’ which prioritizes coherence and plausibility over verification. When someone cites Adolescence as evidence, it is a way of expressing emotional and social truth. It does not necessarily reveal any confusion between fact and fiction. However, high production values, natural dialogue, and emotional resonance create perceived realism, making fiction feel ‘more real’ than fact.”

III.b. Fan Fiction Goes Mainstream

• Articles discussing the deliberate cultivation of fan fiction works and writers for the mainstream publishing industry

  • A Sherwood article from 2024 talking about the fan fiction book boom and the cultural acceptance of fan fiction in the literary mainstream

  • This 2017 article in Forbes details how Twilight fan fiction became 50 Shades of Grey

  • Fanfiction writer Britta Lundin talks about how much fan fiction has influenced her work as a television writer, specifically for the series Riverdale.

  • A short list from Audible of some books that were fan fiction works or which were written by authors who got their start in fan fiction.

  • A post on Twitter in which Chloé Zhao, writer and director of Eternals mentions her fan fiction influence, and even says she intends to write fan fiction about her own film and put it on AO3 under a pen name.

  • An interview with Damien Gerard, a writer on Our Flag Means Death, on the importance and influence of fanfiction.

    “Fanfiction is the lifeblood of the industry. […] So, what importance does fanfiction have? The most importance.”

  • This article talks about multiple theories regarding the way producers attempt to retake control of their media’s narratives while also appealing to fan groups by meta references to popular “fanons”, using BBC’s Sherlock as an example.

  • This study examined the ways fanfiction writers had changed how they engage with stories generally. Here’s a quote from one of the interviewed writers:

    “One of the weirdest special skills I’ve gotten from reading a bunch of fanfiction is, after watching the movie, knowing exactly what the popular fanfiction on Archive of Our Own will be about for this movie, […] and what the most popular kinds of fanfiction are in a fandom, immediately after watching something or reading something, because I participate in the spaces so much that it influences the way I see media. And that includes the community, because I know what’s popular, because I’ve engaged with other fanfictions, and I write, occasionally, I write what’s popular, because I know what other people want to read, and, yeah, that kind of communal aspect impacts just how I see media and how I engage with fanfiction as well.”

  • Another article talking about how much more common it is now for fan fiction to be openly referenced by mainstream writers. This one also talks about Ali Hazelwood’s (the author of The Love Hypothesis, a Star Wars fanfiction with “the serial numbers filed off”) success story.

  • A note: I tried to find the article I read that listed Twilight among the works that were derived from fan fiction stories, but I couldn’t. It’s possible it is just a rumor. It’s possible it’s more than that. But I couldn’t find my source.
    Funnily enough, I quadruple-checked everything else in this video, but not that, as that notion has been an accepted fact that I’ve taken for granted for a decade. If anyone knows of a more definite source on this, do please drop me a message, thank you.

III.c. On the Matter Regarding Female Perpetrators of Sexual Crimes Against Minors

There is precious little data on this, as I’m sure most of you are aware. The greatest barriers to data collection and analysis are the tendency of female crimes against boys to go unreported for a variety of reasons, and also the unfortunate dearth of data in general on sexual misconduct done by teachers in public education.

That said, there is some information out there.

This graph showing a comparison between male perpetrators and female perpetrators (both teachers) shows that for statutory rape specifically (not all sexual misconduct, but only statutory rape), female teachers outpace male, but also receive significantly less severe punishments, almost half what men receive. This graph only covers 2013-2016. There are ways to contact the ones who compiled the data for the graph at the source link.

This 2024 study says that female teachers and school staff account for 24.6% of cases of sexual misconduct against minors. Some data suggests that the current year number should be closer to 43%.

This study from 2012-14, which features a section detailing several analyses that were done specifically in Texas, found that in 1994, 4% of offenders were female and in 2003 it was 12%. If we were to split the difference in the above two numbers (24.6 and 43), that gives us a rough current estimate of 33-34%. That represents a constantly rising number which is also growing faster and faster.
However, given the fact that female sexual crimes against males are probably the most under-reported sexual crimes of all, that number could easily be doubled, meaning that the number could actually be higher than 50%.

Conclusion

This is a topic with a hundred interconnected tendrils and is thus difficult to approach directly.

Fan fiction, as I said in the video, is not in itself bad. But our postmodern society, our attitude of absolute permissiveness towards all kinds of degenerate pornography, and a dozen other factors have all combined to produce a creative environment in which the preponderance of fan fiction written is, at the very least, of a tremendously low literary quality. I have no concerns about low-quality fan fiction, they are under no obligation to be masterpieces. But now fan fiction is feeding literature, and this lack of concern towards literary quality has spread into the new literary environment that is entirely choked by fan fiction’s all-important concepts of representation and identity politics.

At worst, however, our current year environment nurtures a spirit in which some of the most mentally, psychologically, and morally damaging material can flourish unchecked. This, too, is of particular concern considering the fact that it has been taking over literature and other forms of storytelling. We are entering an era in which all storytelling is the fruit of fan fiction.

Moreover, a disproportionate amount of fan fiction is not only explicit, but of a profoundly disturbing variety. A number of other concerns appear which are hard to analyze beyond making educated observations. For instance, why are male/male gay pairings so popular among women? Why are there so many stories with teen sex? or characters who appear to be children? when the majority of AO3 users are in their 20s and 30s? Why does AO3 work so hard to protect explicit material involving children when such material is not protected by the First Amendment?

I pose the questions not to start fights, but to start conversations, real conversations. Because fan fiction is ruining not just literature and other storytelling, but also itself. Fan fiction could be wonderful. But it was the first casualty of whatever this thing is that is now infecting the rest of literary culture.

In the 1959 Paul Newman movie The Young Philadelphians, Newman’s Anthony Lawrence spends one memorable scene trying to make small talk with the beautiful, intimidating Joan Dickinson (played to perfection by Barbara Rush). As a law school student, this talk naturally centered on education. He talked a bit about his goal to become a lawyer and the difficulties he was encountering. And then, being both polite and curious, he asked about her education. What were her goals? Her aspirations? She laughed lightly and said: “Oh, no, you see. I’ve been very carefully educated to be an idiot.”

I saw this movie as a child with my parents. Both of whom laughed heartily at this scene. From time to time they would quote Joan, especially when they encountered some high level grad student who couldn’t, it seemed, endure abstract thought.

“Well, you see,” my father would quip, “he’s been very carefully educated to be an idiot.”

As it turns out, that was entirely true. Americans (I can’t speak to the education systems in other countries, but one can certainly make deductions…) have been the subject of a decades-long experiment in deliberate social adjustment.

I touched on all these topics in my recent video on the declining ability to write, but this article is intended to collect as many resources as possible on this topic so you can go forth and educate yourself. Do your own reading and draw your own conclusions.

I. Books Which Approach the Topic Directly

As it has become increasingly apparent to anyone who has even a passing interest in the education of American children that something is amiss, many current and former professional educators have taken it upon themselves to do their own research. Some then wrote books collecting their findings. These books tend to be insta-dismissed as the ravings of crackpot loonies given their alarmist titles and appearances. But they are typically very well written, well researched, and full of primary sources for their claims. So many sources, in fact, that they make for good jumping-off points for more in-depth research. Here are the most popular, and the ones I personally found to be the most interesting:

• The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (1999)
  The author has provided this book for free, the above link takes you to the official pdf found on her estate’s website (Iserbyte passed in 2022). It was a first resource for many parents in the early aughts who wondered why their children were struggling so much in school. It details a number of ills that plague American schools and the way these are the direct result of a deliberate alteration to the entire purpose of education. The book is called “a paper trail” and includes hundreds of sources. Very little of the book is actually written by Iserbyt. She instead built it as a kind of timeline. Events are listed, with their significance given in a brief paragraph, and then long quotes from primary sources are provided to illustrate the point.
  Iserbyt was a senior policy advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, in the U.S. Department of Education, under Ronald Reagan.

• The Leipzeig Connection by Paolo Lionni (1993)
  A fascinating, brief, well-researched introduction to an oft-overlooked aspect of modern American education’s evolution: its experimental psychological skeleton. This book details the men, ideas, and methods used to psychologically create an “education” system that was optimized to socially mold human beings into whatever shape the educator chose.
  The fourth chapter, “Mice and Monkeys”, is particularly fascinating and details the ways animal conditioning was implemented in the classroom and used to modify and control education expectations while dismissing outliers as inherently “deficient”. These “deficient” pupils were then deemed lacking in intelligence and siphoned off to vocational training so they could begin working as soon as they were legally allowed to leave school. Later, these deficient pupils were controlled and modulated with medication.

• The New Illiterates by Samuel L. Blumenfeld
  A book that details not only the ways in which these horrendous teaching methods have failed children, but also the arrogance and indifference of the instigators.

  “When one begins to think of the incalculable damage done to the young minds of America through defective teaching techniques, one can scarcely contain one’s anger. Flesch was accused of writing in anger by his critics, as if anger were an inappropriate reaction to gross pedagogical malpractice which has had a ruinous effect on the literacy of millions of children. […] If it bothers you to see children suffering and failing needlessly because of defective teaching methods obstinately adhered to against all criticism, you will become angry.”

  and

  “We have the most inarticulate generation of college students in our history, and this may well account for their mass outbreaks of violence. They have no more intelligent way to express themselves.” (Blumenfeld is quoting Karl Shapiro)

  Aside from that, this book also features a lengthy section on practical methods to use to teach your children how to read (as young as preschool!)
  (p.s. the above link for this book is an affiliate link for bookshop.com. If you have children and want to teach them yourself, I do highly recommend this book.)

• Reading in the Brain by French neurolinguist Stanislas Dehaene (2009)
  Dehaene gets into the neurology of language learning, showing how the means by which we learn to read creates a specific type of neural pathway. Phonics creates one type and whole language creates another. He shows how the phonics path is much faster and more neurologically efficient. Nevertheless, we still don’t entirely understand how the brain snaps sound to meaning. Nor how the brain chooses the optimal path to meaning. It’s a fascinating book with just as many questions as answers.

  • (The above link takes you to amazon. If you’d prefer, you can use my affiliate link to get the book at bookshop.com)
    LINK

II. Books Written by the Culprits

The following books were written by proponents of the education reforms, including Dewey himself and Frederick Taylor Gates, who had begun as Rockefeller’s money man and gradually came to guide and direct his boss’s financial control over various social revolutions in industrial America. There are many books out there — many, many, many are referenced in the above books — but these are the ones that I, personally, am familiar with.

• The Country School of Tomorrow, by Frederick Taylor Gates (1853)
  This book features the quote which is, in all likelihood, the one often paraphrased and attributed to Rockefeller, in which he calls for a nation of workers not a nation of thinkers:

  “In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. […] We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply. […] So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm.” (emphasis added by me)

• Dewey on Education by John Dewey (1959)
  This wild book includes Dewey’s “Pedagogic Creed” which reads like a religious manifesto, with paragraph after paragraph beginning with “I believe…” As an example:

  “I believe that all questions of grading the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child’s fitness for social life and reveal the place in which he can be of the most service and where he can receive the most help.”

• Critical Teaching and Everyday Life by Ira Shor (1980)
  This book is possibly one of the first times the term “critical literacy” was used in the way in which it is currently defined. Shor follows in the footsteps of Paulo Freire, another Socialist and the guy who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and who is considered among the institutors of critical theory. He — and Shor — believed that education was to be used as means of social restructuring. Ira Shor wanted to use the act of teaching a child to read, as well as many other elements of teaching, to inculcate certain important social ideas in the plastic and malleable minds of children. This book is at least as disturbing as the above. Forty-five years old and it contains the same verbiage, talking points, phrasing, and trigger words as you see now on reddit, college campuses, and twitter feeds.
  Purporting to present a means of education that allows students to transcend their oppressed circumstances, it actually presents a key methodology for maintaining malleable, empty brains (NPC brains, if you will) which lack the ability to think critically, truly think critically. That is, it ostensibly presents to children a means by which they may free themselves from oppression, but very clearly is providing a teaching manual for transforming a child into an adult who is entirely imprisoned by his, or her, academic and social overlords. The book condemns, among other things, any system that fails to promote “collective work or group deliberation”. (pg. 70)

  “Prior to scheduling classes, Freirian educators study the life and language of their prospective students. These sociological inquiries permit them to discover a small number of key words from daily life—called ‘generative

  words’—which will be used for both problematizing experience and for literacy teaching. The generative words, like ‘brick,’ ‘rice,’ ‘slum’ or ‘wealth,’ suggest social themes around which consciousness can be raised.”

• This Action Learning manual for “literacy practitioners” for the teaching of whole language (1996) is the one I referred to in the video for its section on generative themes, which begins on page 19 (page 26 of the PDF).
  This is another publication I would classify as disturbing. Filled with jargon and circuitous, non-specific, Orwellian (or Huxley-esque) academia-speak it informs teachers to throw out “narrow” definitions of literacy and focus the vast, vast amount of their energies on the social aspect. This book, almost more than any other I found, highlighted the explicit ways in which education has now become psychological formation.
  Among other things, teachers are referred to as “facilitators”, which is the language often used to describe the people who are overseeing and carrying out psychological (and other academic) studies on test subjects, implicitly suggesting that pupils should no longer be viewed by teachers as students but as test subjects (the manual refers to them as “learners”).
  Please bear in mind, the following quote is taken from a section of the book that is telling teachers how to teach people how to read:

  “Making a Code: When you have identified some of the generative themes, the next step is to find a way to present them to the literacy class in a way that will encourage them to explore and discuss the meaning and importance of the theme. [Paulo] Freire calls this step making a code. The code is a way to present the theme back to the people so that they can objectively discuss it. The code may be a picture, a role play, a story, or an activity. For example, one facilitator who observed that alcoholism and gambling were causing problems in a rural village, simply brought an empty beer bottle and a deck of cards to class and set them on a table. She asked the learners how they felt about these items and they carried the discussion from there. Role play is another effective way to encode a generative theme. The Action Learning Manual in this series entitled Role Play is a helpful resource on how to use role play in a literacy class if you would like to learn more.”

III. Studies on the Results of Abandoning Phonics Education

This is a tricky topic to approach. At first glance, there seem to be just as many studies that seem to suggest that literacy has been unaffected by moving away from phonics as there are studies that showcase the deficits of non-phonics teaching. Two points are worth remembering:

First, I think it’s helpful to remember that the more the so-called Reading Wars wage on, the less time people have to wonder why these alterations were even put in place to start with. (We call that High Level Tin Hat™.) All these studies treat whole language or look-say or whatever as if they are legitimate efforts to teach children how to read. When they simply were not. If you read the language of the systems’ authors (in one of the books above, for example), you get the impression that teaching reading was not the goal, but rather social conditioning.

Second, the studies that support a lack of phonics treat literacy in hazy, inexact terms and then announce that, as you can clearly see! literacy is unaffected by the means of teaching reading. First they change the definition of literacy, then they tell you literacy has been unaffected. It’s more or less acceptable that, yes, whole language &c, &c can result in a child who can read. But it’s the nature of that literacy that is so fundamentally different from the literacy of a child taught using phonics.

With that in mind, I am only providing studies that speak to these more specific areas, that is, things like prosody and reading comprehension, as well as few meta-analyses of the other studies done by professionals far more experienced in these areas than I am.

A) On the Links Between the Method Used to Teach Reading and a Form of Dyslexia

• The "Sight Reading" Method of Teaching Literacy as a Source of Reading Disability by Samuel T. Orton, A.M. M.D. (1929, Journal of Educational Psychology)

• Can Dyslexia Be Artificially Induced in School? Yes, Says Researcher Edward Miller by Samuel L. Blumenfeld (1992)

  Another interesting (but brief) article looking at the possible links between look-say and whole language teaching methods and the rise in cases of dyslexia. This brief introduction to the look-say method (&c.) and its pitfalls was written by the same author of The New Illiterates.

• Dyslexia: A language learning impairment by Margaret J. Snowling, a Fellow at the British Academy (2013)
  This paper is on dyslexia more broadly, however in the language intervention section she points out that phonics caused significant improvements in children with dyslexia.

B) Studies on the Efficacy of Different Literacy Learning Methods

• This article is an interesting, very brief introduction to the major arguments against phonics.

• An Evidence Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature On Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction
  An enormous meta-analysis that looks at the results of a huge number of studies on phonics vs. other teaching methods. Even I couldn’t read this whole study (it’s so long) but I read several chapters, especially those having to do with alphabet teaching and certain findings regarding teaching method. For instance, phonics-based teaching produced the best results in classes with fewer children.

• A Meta-Analysis and Literature Review of Language Programs

  Nathaniel Hansford performed another in-depth meta-analysis of sixty-three language learning studies. This link leads to a detailed summary of his findings with extensive sourcing. He has also written a book on science-based teaching methods which might be of interest to parents and educators out there. Links are on his website.

• Whole Language Method or Phonics Method…

  The 2023 study that talks about the impact phonics learning has on readers’ prosody, among other things.

• A commentary on Bowers (2020) and the role of phonics instruction in reading
  In 2020 Jeffrey Bowers published this article in which he critiqued at length the prevailing opinion that teaching phonics, especially at the beginning of literacy learning, made any positive difference. Jack M. Fletcher, Robert Savage, and Sharon Vaughn published the above commentary in response in 2022

• Disputing recent attempts to reject the evidence in favour of systematic phonics instruction

  Another dispute of Bowers and another similar critique of phonics

C) Studies on the Neurological Differences Between Phonics Learning and Other Methods

• Development of Neural Systems for Reading
  Professor Bruce McCandliss’s study

• Stanford study on brain waves shows how different teaching methods affect reading development by May Wong, Stanford Report (2015)
  This article details the above study done by Stanford Professor Bruce McCandliss, which I spoke of in the video. The article is an excellent summary, if you don’t have time to read the whole study.

• Comparing and Validating Methods of Reading Instruction Using Behavioural and Neural Findings in an Artificial Orthography

  Another study on the neurologically different ways in which the brain learns language based on the method used to teach it. This one also found an overwhelmingly superior result in the phonics-based group.

• Neural deficits in children with dyslexia ameliorated by behavioral remediation: Evidence from functional MRI

  Another study on using phonics to correct dyslexia, except this one took an additional neurological approach. Not only did the subjects’ reading improve in several areas, there was also an improvement in brain activity

D) On the Decline of SAT and PSAT Scores, and On the Changes to Scoring and Tests to Make Them Easier

• Problems With New PSAT by Art Sawyer, Bruce Reed, and Adam Ingersoll, the founders of Compass Education Group (2016)
  A heavily researched, concise examination of the major problems that appeared in 2015 with PSAT scoring.

• GPT takes the SAT: Tracing changes in Test Difficulty and Students' Math Performance by Saannidhya Rawat and Vikram K. Suresh from the University of Cincinnati (2024)
  These researchers used AI to assess the difficulty level of the SATs while also analyzing the decline in score, and found that the difficulty level has decreased, but scores have also, nevertheless, continued to decrease. That is: they made the test easier and easier, and yet scores are still steadily declining.

• A brief article from 1996 that shines some light on the “recentering” controversy that artificially raised reported SAT scores.

• A comprehensive history and breakdown of the history of SAT scores and what precisely changed with the recentering.
  
  

IV. Miscellaneous Links and Articles

• The Rise and Fall of the Factory System: Technology, firms, and households since the Industrial Revolution by Joel Mokyr

  This paper details the rising need of factory owners for a large quantity of a specific kind of “human capital”. Presenting, among other things, the shifting attitude towards “common people” that was emerging among the extremely wealthy industrial elite.

• Soviets In the Classroom
  Another thoroughly sourced paper from Charlotte Iserbyt (author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America) about the American government allowing Soviet influence in American education starting in the 1930s, detailing, among other things, American school’s implementation of curriculum that was developed with the aid of the Soviet government.

• This Financial Times article caused a bit of a stir when it reported on what appeared to be a near-global decline in human intelligence. The article is brief but includes a lot of sourced data. Here’s one of the many charts in the article, to give you an idea:

• Here are the links to the PIAAC website and the data regarding current trends in literacy, which I spoke about at length in the video

  • This details the PIAAC's definitions of their different literacy levels

  • These are the PIAAC 2023 national results

• They Don't Read Very Well, A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities
  Here’s a link to the study done on literacy among English lit majors, which I spoke about in the video

• The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books by Rose Horowitch
  This 2024 article in The Atlantic relates how college professors have found themselves increasingly unable to expect literary and humanities students to actually read whole books.

• How to Build Students’ Reading Stamina by Stephen Sawchuk
  This 2024 article in Education Week details the decline in children’s reading stamina since 2019.

• Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading Hint: It’s not just the screens. by Katherine Marsh
  This unexpectedly fascinating 2023 article in The Atlantic posits that an overemphasis on critical analysis, especially at a young age — a core tenet of modern literacy training — has contributed to the decline in children’s interest in reading

• This 2023 study reports that reading on screens actually decreases reading comprehension among children.

• This article in Education Week from 2024 talks about the above study as well as other interesting studies on the effects of primarily screen reading in children, including impacts on brain development

• The Nation's Report Card, where you can look at data for academic performance dating back to 1992. The data can be broken down by demographic, jurisdiction (public school or private school), year, and subject. That’s where I got this chart:

* A note on Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song

I didn’t spend as much time researching education in Europe, England, or elsewhere. However, as I used a Booker Prize (a United Kingdom / Ireland prize) winning novel by Paul Lynch, Prophet Song, as an example in the video of bad writing, I think it’s worth mentioning that he was born and raised in Ireland, where an integrated phonics+whole language system is used for teaching reading. This official state teaching manual details extensively the strategies implemented in Irish schools’ curriculum, which reads the same as those for American schools (except that Irish schools emphasize the learning of the Irish language as a secondary language as well).
In addition, this article from The Irish Times (2022) reveals that the Reading Wars are also being waged there, and that Irish parents are noticing a sharp decline in their children’s ability to read.

This official teaching manual, which outlines the Irish schools’ “framework” for curriculum, features prime examples of something else I’ve been noticing throughout all my research: the language with which children’s education is discussed and presented has become fundamentally corporate. Look at this chart which I screencapped from the above manual:

However, the following example is even more indicative of this corporate-ification of education:

They even refer to all parties involved in education as “stakeholders”.

V. Conclusion

This is a lot of information, but I hope you can find something in here that helps you educate yourself about the current state of modern schools.
The inability to write well is only one of countless negative results of our education system. There is no part of modern education that helps children. Any help that a child might receive (often only by accident or due to the crusading power of a particularly energetic teacher, or due to the child’s own innate, above average intelligence) is far outweighed by the harm.

Buy Me a Coffee

This essay expands upon a point I made in my Heroes and Heroism video.

I cannot be the only one to have noticed that fictional heroes these days have become incredibly boring.

To be clear, I do not mean that heroic characters are, by virtue of their “good guy” status, uninteresting. But rather that writers have been taking less and less care in the formation of these “good guy” characters. Their heroic traits are more or less identical, their heroic behavior is safe and predictable, and the stories built around them have little substance or merit. As a result, many writers — and readers — now think of heroism as boring in itself, and heroes as boredom personified. Antiheroes are touted as “deeper” and “richer”, and even villains find themselves upheld as, if nothing else, more interesting.

If I’m remembering the stories from my childhood with any accuracy at all, this was not always the case, not even in popular culture. Heroes have only recently been dulled, villains have only recently become the darlings of sympathetic character development, and antiheroes have only recently achieved cultural sainthood.

If one were to recall the literary and cultural world of the last decade one would, perhaps, remember that all or most of the beloved heroic icons of popular culture recently underwent a kind of mass cancellation. In some cases it was race or gender based, in other cases these characters were merely being used as examples for loosely adjacent real world concepts, such as when superheroes were sacrificed on the anti-police altar.

Yes, the current nothing-characters that grace our screens and pages have perhaps been shallowed and dulled, in part, by their writers’ fear of joining the ranks of these other condemned heroes and heroic fiction writers. And so, in their effort to craft “acceptable” heroes, these writers have chosen to use accepted character formulas. Like short order cooks throwing together a bowl of corn chowder, there are certain ingredients they must use, certain ingredients they must never use, and the only room for innovation or creativity they’re allowed is aesthetic. The bowl and the garnish, let’s say. Or the costume and the particular way in which the corn chowder hero cracks his jokes.

These formulas (or formulae, if you’d prefer) have been studied and used with such religious care and devotion for so many generations of writers that a new and disturbing situation has begun to emerge. Indeed, the increasing reliance on these checklists of traits to define or construct a literary hero is perhaps the most telling symptom of this new, core problem: No one seems to know anymore what a hero even is.

Originally, and in many academic settings, a “hero” was little more than the male main character of a story, with, of course, a “heroine” being a female main character. What’s important to note is that, historically, the majority of writers did not need to be told what specific traits they ought to give their heroic characters in order for their audiences to perceive them as “heroic”.

Many characters from ancient works and even older modern works possessed a whole array of traits, some good, some bad. Historically, writers — and readers — understood when a character, despite his flaws or mistakes, was a hero and when he had crossed the moral event horizon. Readers did not have to wring their hands with anxiety whenever their heroes made a bad decision or did something they shouldn’t have. They understood and accepted the objective core of heroism, the truth that glowed at the center of all moral considerations, without which good and evil cannot ever be comprehended, much less conveyed.

Like it or not, the fictional representation of heroism, virtue, and morality in stories is necessarily reliant on the writer’s understanding of heroism, virtue, and morality. And these days, very few people, never mind writers, really understand these things. And even if they do, even if most writers could, to some degree, be considered moral individuals, that doesn’t mean that they will be able to understand the immense moral complexities that they attempt to write for their characters. So it follows that the characters will inevitably have less and less moral realism, resulting in less and less compelling or interesting heroes.

If a writer doesn’t understand true morality, how can the morality of their characters be interesting, complex, or in any way true to real life?

Writers of old — the ones who passed down to us the foundation stones of western literature like Le Morte D’Arthur, The Song of Roland, Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, etc. — had themselves a keen understanding of the basis of morality, that is truth itself. Or, if you like, Truth. Objective morality was a cornerstone of western society for centuries and informed the telling of beloved tales. Later storytellers were then also taught both storytelling and morality by, in part, reading these tales. Thus we have, to name only a few, The Last of the Mohicans, Captains Courageous, Jane Eyre, the works of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Dostoevsky, and so on, and so on. These storytellers — and their audiences — had a more complex grasp of moral nuance than your average philosophy major today because their understanding of morality stemmed from simple, objective truth. Thus, their heroes could be flawed, sometimes greatly so, and yet their heroism was still easily recognizable to the average person. This understanding of truth and morality was then passed down from storyteller to listener, from generation to generation, forming a civilization that, until recently, grasped not just true heroism, but also truth itself.

Most writers, and even a great many people these days, don’t even realize that morality is an area of objective right and wrong, or even that morality needs to be considered when constructing or analyzing heroes, or any character. Yet it’s impossible to really define heroism — or villainy — without talking about morality. Even if writers and teachers do understand that such a thing is essential to the study of heroes and heroic characters, most are hesitant to venture into moral territory. What if someone disagrees with you? What if no one buys your book? What if you get canceled?

So instead, when writers are trying to build characters, especially heroes and antiheroes, they will focus mainly on those previously-mentioned formulaic sets of requirements found on writing websites or in writing books. Readers and literature students will also find themselves studying these character classification principles in an effort to better understand the stories they love. These resources seem to list traits and qualities that each of these character classes must possess. One such list indicates that any character who will be classified as a “hero” must be on the right side of the law, must be a conformist, and must “get the girl”. An example provided is Edward Cullen from Twilight.

Yet not a single such formula will permit the space necessary to discuss or define morality as it pertains to heroism or villainy. This is especially true of any notion of objective morality, itself a concept largely dismissed as fictional in today’s society.

But writers who find themselves unable or unwilling to navigate the morality of heroism will find these classification systems comfortable alternatives to the complex philosophical thinking they are unwilling to carry out themselves. As for literature students, well, if a writer refuses such an undertaking, why should the reader take up the slack? How, then, can any piece of literature — or indeed any story of any medium — contain even a trace amount of moral depth or truth?

The “hero” made with these mass-production formulas will necessarily be an incredibly boring, two-dimensional cut-out who does little more than parrot the shallow moral and ethical hotwords of current year while otherwise expressing very little moral opinion of any kind.

As safe as this might be, it is also boring, and everyone knows it, readers and writers alike. Therefore many writers will instead resort to the increasingly vague catch-all character category:

The antihero.

Antiheroes, by most definitions, are a great deal more interesting to modern writers and readers. Various assessments could be made as to why this is. For instance, antiheroes are often classified as rebels, they are permitted an assortment of vices such as drugs or promiscuity, and, according to some, they will not reflect society’s higher values.

Social and moral issues aside, antiheroes can’t help but be more attractive to writers who want a little more creative freedom when crafting their heroes. The lists of requirements for “conventional” heroes are, we can all agree, entirely too restrictive. Too, many readers perusing the shelves would likely prefer the interesting “antihero” to the arbitrarily regulated “hero”.

Nevertheless, the writer – and the reader – will still find himself provided with no method by which to classify these characters as heroic or antiheroic other than these lists of traits. At no point will the writer make any kind of objective assessment of the morality of the character. And if they do think to do so, matters will then become even more confused.

I know I’m not the only person to have noticed this, but in today’s world the only metric by which morality seems to be measured is one of emotions. This is the only means by which anyone has been taught to understand morality. If something makes a person feel bad it must be immoral. If something makes him feel good it must be morally acceptable, no matter what it is.

Morality, in reality, has very little, if anything, to do with a person’s feelings. If a writer fails to learn the absolutes of moral truth he will never be able to convey its nuances, emotional or otherwise. And a reader laboring under an emotionally-bound understanding of morals will be similarly restricted in his efforts to comprehend a simple moral character, never mind a complex one.

Reducing morality to a matter strictly of emotion is how we have reached a point in cultural decline at which audiences feel enough sympathy for the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer – as depicted in Netflix’s controversial Dahmer miniseries – that they refuse to hold him responsible for his crimes, or will even go as far as calling him a “good man” who kindly gave his victims “quick deaths”. The writers themselves, despite their claims to the contrary, seemed to perhaps unintentionally lean in this direction, tugging at the natural tendency of audiences to feel empathy for characters who are suffering, and thus guiding the moral interpretation of their sordid tale in such a way that it stirred up feelings of uncomfortable sympathy for its real life titular serial killer.

Using emotions to build morality isn’t the only emotionally-centric error of modern writers. Emotions are also used to manipulate the cultural opinions of the audiences. As in the case of Netflix’s Dahmer — or HBO’s Game of Thrones and The Leftovers and many celebrated attempts at compelling literary fiction in the last decades — most writers these days falsely equate these emotional feelings of discomfort with good writing. If they’ve made their audience feel uncomfortable, then they’ve succeeding in writing a compelling character or plot, or so they assume. The more “compelling” their story, the more inclined audiences will be to refer to it and its writers for real world social and moral commentary.

However, Netflix’s Dahmer character was not uncomfortable because he was compellingly written, but rather because the writers’ assessment and presentation of his morality was so upside down, a fact most rational humans watching the show could instinctively perceive. In spite of that, these rational humans have nevertheless been conditioned throughout their lives to assess morality solely through the lens of emotion. Thus they could only assess their discomfort at Dahmer’s portrayed morality based on feelings. That is, simply, if they felt sorry for him, he must not have been a bad person.

This childish approach to morality is the most common today. Audiences who found themselves compelled to feel sympathy for a sadistic serial killer were uncomfortable not because it was compelling, but because it was an affront to basic morality. It’s the same mechanic as the one at play when we feel uncomfortable watching a rape scene. It’s not because it’s compelling, or well-written, or realistic. It’s because rape is a visceral assault on our rational understanding of morality. The emotional discomfort proceeds from an objective, rational understanding, as it should. However most writers — and readers — understand the opposite. The emotional discomfort itself is immorality. As if the immorality of the act is contained merely in the fact that it made someone feel uncomfortable.

When scenes of this nature are written in such a way that those feelings of revulsion or discomfort are downplayed or even eliminated, some audiences will call this “provocative” or “compelling” and will be less able to assess the morality because they won’t find themselves feeling particularly bad, given the deliberate writing. The writers have done nothing to create moral complexity, they have merely manipulated the audience’s moral perception with emotion. In addition to which, many studies have found that fiction tends to guide the formation of real life moral and social opinions in audience’s minds. And so this emotional manipulation then also becomes social engineering.

All of this because both parties involved, writers and audiences, are using emotions to judge morality.

In order for a writer to build a morally complex — and true — heroic character he must have a very firm, very basic understanding of objective, non-emotionally driven morality.

The more complex the story’s moral landscape, the more firmly-grounded the writer’s understanding must be. This is why so many of the great, masterful writers of old spent so long studying morality and philosophy in an effort to wrap their ordinary person minds around extraordinary moral circumstances. Such an undertaking is hard work, but it’s worth it. Famously, Dostoevksy labored for years to understand the moral nuances of his The Brothers Karamazov, as his journals relate. And few books — and few characters — can be said to match that exceptional accomplishment.

Most writers, and indeed most people these days, simply do not have that breadth of understanding. Such knowledge can absolutely be pursued, but the importance of studying morality is almost inconceivable in today’s society. Most people don’t even realize that morality is not an emotional matter, never mind that it is an objective matter.

For their part, writers seem to find no real benefit in exploring morality in any sense other than how it makes them feel and how they can use it to affect the emotions of their readers.

Of course, this isn’t to say that all heroic characters must be flawless. Indeed, if a writer’s moral foundation is fixed on solid ground and not on emotion, he will be capable of constructing a heroic character who is far from perfect. Perhaps such a heroic character will be overcome by his flaws, ultimately developing into a veritable Shakespearean tragic hero, like Hamlet. Or perhaps this hero will labor to overcome his flaws, thereby creating a variation on the almost-extinct aspirational hero, like Tolkien’s Samwise Gamgee, or C.S. Lewis’s Edmund Pevensie.

In any case, the writer needs to understand the moral clay with which he is forming his heroes (and his villains), and that clay does not and cannot include emotions. No matter how flawed or otherwise well-written such a character is, everything about him will fall flat if the foundational morality on which he is built is itself either unstable and uncertain, or wholly erroneous. That is to say, if writers doesn’t understand basic morality — or, dare I say, accept basic morality — then how can they even begin to write morally true characters?

It is true, of course, that emotion is a crucial aspect of mankind’s existence. It is also true that divorcing the mind entirely from emotion is not a realistic solution to any problem. However the fact that emotion is such an important part of the human condition is often used to justify its prioritization in matters of morality. What those who argue for this fail to realize, however, is that emotion is not the foundation on which morality is built. But rather rational, objective morality must form the groundwork. And from that ground ordered emotion can emerge.

There are stories throughout history of heroic characters pursuing justice or combating villains with a certain marked emotion. Readers of ancient classics and of medieval epics will be familiar with many such heroes. Angered, perhaps, by betrayal, or by the murder of their family, the invasion of their lands, or the defiling of their sacred places, they will be driven and motivated by this emotion until their task is completed. What is crucial, however, is that this emotion was not ever the foundation of their moral character nor was it the metric by which they — or their authors — measured justice and morality. It was, perhaps, the fuel that propelled them through the difficult tasks of their heroic journey. But reason and a firm understanding of true, objective morality was what ordered and directed their furious anger. And, in fact, in the instances in which these ancient heroes became tragic heroes it was almost always as a result of their emotion becoming less the fuel and more the guide of their actions, as in the case of Hamlet.

All humans are emotional creatures. It is how we were made and it serves its purpose. But in spite of this — or even because of it — all of us must also order and constrain our emotions with reason. Placing such restrictions and guidance on our moral acts is what enables us both to know what is or isn’t right and also to know what acts and what heroes are truly admirable. Assessing the character of, for instance, Count Roland from the medieval epic that bears his name, from the initial standpoint of moral objectivity allows us to order our emotional response to his tragic final stand. The ability to intellectually and then emotionally appreciate a heroic character is a major factor in that character’s ability to influence mankind for the better, and also to resonate with readers enough to potentially become a beloved part of popular culture.

So-called confessional writing, in which the author uses the characters and the narrative to relate personal experiences in an almost autobiographical way — such as Plath’s Bell Jar — has only risen in popularity. Such an attitude towards literary pursuits is very in keeping with the philosophy of the social media influencer who seeks to use “authenticity” to elicit enough views and likes to create the perception of relevance. Doing so in literature is childish self-indulgence. It is also very much the norm. No author these days, it seems, can create a character who is not in some way him — or her — self. Which is all mere literary onanism outside of which nothing of any significance can be pursued or comprehended.

This kind of writing has resulted in the current parasitical literary infestation of “self-insert” characters. Aside from being embarrassingly self-indulgent, this habit also prevents the creation of heroic or aspirational characters of any kind. In an age when “aspiration” is a hateful word, no person wishes to be positively portrayed endeavoring to accomplish a difficult and worthy task. Or, worse yet, endeavoring to better themselves. Likewise, they would also seek to portray certain faults as not just acceptable, but also admirable. Whether this is an iniquitous level of irresponsibility, or an attraction to disturbingly young boys or girls, it only matters that the moral flaw is not depicted as a moral flaw, as this would force the writer to admit that his (or her) own flaws are just that, flaws. As such the morality in these writings hinges on the notion that there is no such thing as objective good and bad, but that the only matter worth considering is the character’s — and the writer’s — feelings.

Heroic characters will continue to be senseless nothings for as long as writers form them with an emotional skeleton instead of a rational – and moral – one. And their work will continue to be nothing more than shallow, meaningless vanities sacrificed at the altar of whatever vague social virtue is currently being championed.

Literature has long since lost its moral objectivity and therefore its moral relevance. Keeping perfect pace, society has long since abandoned the standards by which morality and good are able to be measured. Each can be blamed for the other’s decline. As long as literature and storytelling lack moral solidity, society’s own sense of its moral self will continue to fade into an amoral, godless haze in which there is no right and wrong.

As Nietzsche famously said, “God is dead.” Or, perhaps more appropriately, as Ivan Karamazov observed, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”

This essay was originally published here.

I read Umberto Eco’s masterpiece, The Name of the Rose, one year before my father joined a cult.

There is, perhaps, a gentler way to put that. But from the time I was fifteen until I left to travel Europe after high school, I lived isolated from the world in a self-sufficient community that bore all the hallmarks of a cult. A community that, while nominally Catholic, nevertheless thrived on its distinction from common Catholicism and its sense of secretive exclusivity. This had appealed to my father, who had moved us there when I was fifteen, not fully understanding what the place was under the glossy veneer of what it claimed to be: paradise.

When I first read The Name of the Rose, it had delighted me merely because its heroes had been easier for me to identify with than others I had come across in fiction. After all, before I had lived in a cult, I had lived in a medieval monastery.

Within the protective walls of my childhood home, my father had managed a transmutation of time and space. The twentieth century was suspended at our property line and replaced with a small pocket of the middle ages.

The murmuring forest across the street isolated the house from modernity. Pale walls in tile hallways had been covered from floor to ceiling in a curated collection of medieval artwork: Giotto, Van Eyck, Fra Angelico, to name a few.

These narrow, claustrophobic galleries opened into the main room, a vaulted expanse designed to draw the eye up, he said, to God. During the evening, an assortment of candles shrunk this large space into a series of glowing amber chambers. Within which we would chant the Hours of late evening. After Compline my father would impose the customary Grand Silence and we would retire to our rooms without a word.

A fixture at the yard sales of newly-remodeled Catholic churches, my father had a way of accumulating more than just the antique books and cast-offs of those places, but the very air. The cold, echoing severity; the marble solidity; the sense of undisturbed divinity that effectively slowed time. Each new acquisition brought with it into our house a glimmer of something that seemed to bend light.

Unwilling to completely eschew the twentieth century (for work, he said), he installed a system of house-wide speakers with which he would broadcast Gregorian chant. A speaker fed this music and its atmosphere into my closed room where I would spend the hours outside my classes reading. Gregorian chant became the soundtrack to The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and lent an air of the surreal to The Secret of the Old Clock and The Lord of the Rings. Hamlet whispered his famous monologue in an awed hush brought on by the numinous atmosphere.

Every morning my father rose at four and recited Matins. Then he repaired to his office where he would spend hours in uninterrupted reading. My father, like the abbot in The Name of the Rose, had a bookcase in the place of his head. The entirety of truth and knowledge, he believed, was contained in the books he read. These included Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, as well as Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, Basil the Great, Bede, Gregory Nazianzen, Tertullian, and John Chrysostom. Origen gave him pause, given his un-orthodox views on the finality of Hell, thus he was placed on a shelf too high for me to reach, even in my teens when I had access to step stools and thorough understanding of their function.

Origen notwithstanding, the authority of these voices was above suspicion. He and I, he said, had no business doubting them or seeking better knowledge elsewhere. Thus he read and read. And their words became his mind. If I asked a question about any matter he would invariably retrieve a book from a shelf and read an answer to me.

Every morning I woke to the sound and smell of his second cup of coffee. I joined him for a recitation of Prime and then, while I watered the flowers and vegetables in our “monastery” garden, he would make me a small cup of sugared coffee. Before he returned to his library, he’d motion to the incense burner on the fireplace mantle.

Incense was as much a fixture of my father’s house as the cinderblock books that were piled on his desk. The smell of incense is, in my mind, synonymous with my childhood. Wisps of frankincense and cassia threaded like ghosts through the dawn-thick air. It was my job to place the pebbles of resin atop a sparking charcoal tablet inside the antique brass incense burner. The white smoke filtered through cut-outs in the shape of crosses. Throughout my youth I was aware that my clothes and hair smelled always of incense.

In time, I began to imitate my father’s studious nature, but in the pursuit of stories, rather than knowledge, little realizing then that the former often carried with them the latter.

When I was fourteen, a work conference summoned my father to New Orleans. I didn’t know it then but this trip would, in the subtlest way imaginable, change my life.

On the fateful day in question we went out in search of museums and bookstores. Though barely past midday, the undulous sky was the indigo of the Virgin Mary’s gown in Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, a dome of velvet covered with wisps of gray clouds like delicate embroidery.

A lush, swollen green smell floated atop the frowsty sweetness of river water. There was enough moisture in the air that I thought it couldn’t possibly matter whether or not it rained. Of course, I was wrong. When the rain did come, it was in walls of hot water that soaked us to the bone in the four minutes it took us to find the first available awning.

We had stumbled by chance upon the creamy facade of Faulkner House Books, a bookstore built into a house where William Faulkner had once lived. The rain prolonged our stay and allowed me the time to conduct a comprehensive study of every book there, while the shopkeepers chatted with my father.

The Name of the Rose was facing out on a shelf near the high ceiling. I had to interrupt the shopkeeper’s conversation with my father to ask her to retrieve it for me. She asked if I was sure; it was a difficult book. But the cover was calling to me and I wouldn’t be swayed. While I read the book jacket she made a few awed remarks to my father about my apparent precocity. I vaguely heard him respond, “she reads books like that all the time.” Which wasn’t precisely true. “There’s quite a bit of untranslated Latin in it, though.” “That’s alright, she studies Latin.” It occurred to me that he was bragging about me. When he agreed to buy the book, knowing only that it was set in a monastery in the middle ages, it was largely because of that. I knew that he would otherwise have never let me purchase a novel published after 1959.

I began reading it immediately. And I finished it in my bedroom with Gregorian chant filtering through the speakers and threads of incense curling in the air. I felt that my father’s world had been created for this book specifically.

Besides the murder mystery plot with its apocalyptic connotations and its labyrinth library setting, the book also illuminated the intellectual chaos of those times, at least among the theologians of the Church. There were countless colorful and fascinating arguments about the political landscape of dogmatic teaching in those days. The main character, William of Baskerville, was a kind of medieval Sherlock Holmes. Though Adso, his loyal assistant and traveling companion, was a bit more naive and clueless than Watson ever was. But I loved Adso, and felt myself mirrored in him in more ways than I would have cared to admit. He frequently found himself witness to these scandalous debates about Church authority, which also shocked my poor, innocent little mind. And, distressed, he rushed to William for guidance.

William patiently explained to our bewildered little monk the distinction between authority and truth. And the distinction between faith and blind obedience. William didn’t think too highly of the various bickering Church and state authorities in his world, but he never faltered in his loyalty to his religion, nor in his faith.

When the other monks attempted to answer questions put to them by Adso or Brother William, it was generally with a quote from one of the acceptable theological or philosophical minds of the times. Even then I could clearly see my father in this. When Adso went to Brother William, however, his master would answer with the thoughts of his own mind, as guided and informed by years of learning. The contrast intrigued me. As did the fact that Brother William was calm and stable-minded, while the monastery was a nest of chaos.

As my father’s health failed, we were forced to abandon his pocket of medieval life and relocate to that paradise, he believed, of like-minded individuals.

For all his studying, my father was nevertheless unprepared for the hostility we were to find. It was not a haven filled with people who longed to learn, but with strange, pressure-cooked conformists who rejected all knowledge — even if it was consistent with their own — if it had not come from their authority.

What had promised to be a place of safety for his one child in the large, frightening world had proven to be outside his ability to either control or change. Like all the other occupants of this disturbing little “paradise,” he conformed. And, like so many of them, he was diminished because of it.

After my father’s death when I was eighteen, I could feel an attempt, by the place, to crush me into its ideal mold. Even the books I read and my own writing fell under constant scrutiny. Alone and unsupported, I should have given in to that immense pressure. Curiously, I didn’t. After all, I was no different from my father in knowledge and learning. But it was as if I was armored by some unconscious wisdom. When I was able to, I removed myself from that cult-like world and set off down my own path.

Years later, when I reread The Name of the Rose, it occurred to me that Brother William had guided not just Adso in those pages, but also me.

How easy it is to forget that truth cannot be controlled by authority. Nor can it be weaponized. Truth is benign and unalterable. Authorities come and go. Cults and their leaders come and go. But truth is eternal.

I often wonder how differently things would have turned out had I not found that book, of all books, in that bookshop, of all bookshops, at that precise moment in my life.

Despite all the confusion and pressure, somehow I had not lost my faith nor my love for knowledge or the written word. I truly believe that I have Brother William — and Mr. Eco — to thank for that.

Subscribe now