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Alien Character Mindsets: Elves should be pretty conservative about almost everything.
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8683402" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>I mean, or the opposite could easily be true.</p><p></p><p>It'd be maladaptive to be stuck in the past, like literally maladaptive. If you lived potentially hundreds of years but got stuck in your ways in your, say, 40s or 60s or 100s or whatever, you'd probably die before you made it to 300, because you were unable to keep up with change, not just to society, but to environments, methods of warfare, the beings who are around, and so on. Only being incredibly magically powerful might prevent that.</p><p></p><p>This fits with a lot of fantasy ideas of elves as flighty or capricious, because honestly, unless they were a bit, they'd get locked into mindsets which passed their "best before" date millennia ago.</p><p></p><p>But ignoring that:</p><p></p><p></p><p>No. You're confusing "conservative thinking" in the small-c sense with very specific ideologies inaccurately labelled "conservative", which emerged extremely recently and are actually not at all "conservative". None of the Founding Fathers of the US would be "fiscal conservatives" by 2020s standards (or 1980s ones). Nor even the right-wing politicians of the 1940s and 1950s, for that matter. Just look at Eisenhower. It was him who warned us about the "military-industrial complex", not hippies, and advocated for social welfare programs. The whole modern idea of "fiscal conservatism" is just that - modern. It's just as modern as LGBT rights, for example, literally, it's from the same time period - the 1960s and 1970s!</p><p></p><p>You're talking about people who would PREDATE CAPITALISM. Your logic might hold to some extent for beings who lived 200 years, and whose views got set in stone in their 50s, say, but 500? 700? That's BEFORE CAPITALISM. It's before money was a huge thing at all. They'd think Adam Smith was a dumb whippersnapper, and would have prevented his ideas getting anywhere if they could manage it.</p><p></p><p>You've got to think about this in a less "in the box" way. Everything post-3000 BC is potentially "off the table". That very much includes things like physical money. When money/wealth is like, a physical thing someone can make off with, that's disadvantageous to a very long-lived being, if it's using that money. They'd want to crack down on that sort of thing. They'd also want to crack down on any middle or mercantile class appearing, or on any religions which weren't their religion and so on.</p><p></p><p>I'm not a big fan of the Malazan setting and I don't think it's well-handled in a lot of ways, but the author does at least attempt to grapple with some of this stuff, and it becomes clear that older mindsets, older ways of making way and so on are often just extremely dumb, and only work if you're incredibly magically powerful so that overrides the stupidity.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8683402, member: 18"] I mean, or the opposite could easily be true. It'd be maladaptive to be stuck in the past, like literally maladaptive. If you lived potentially hundreds of years but got stuck in your ways in your, say, 40s or 60s or 100s or whatever, you'd probably die before you made it to 300, because you were unable to keep up with change, not just to society, but to environments, methods of warfare, the beings who are around, and so on. Only being incredibly magically powerful might prevent that. This fits with a lot of fantasy ideas of elves as flighty or capricious, because honestly, unless they were a bit, they'd get locked into mindsets which passed their "best before" date millennia ago. But ignoring that: No. You're confusing "conservative thinking" in the small-c sense with very specific ideologies inaccurately labelled "conservative", which emerged extremely recently and are actually not at all "conservative". None of the Founding Fathers of the US would be "fiscal conservatives" by 2020s standards (or 1980s ones). Nor even the right-wing politicians of the 1940s and 1950s, for that matter. Just look at Eisenhower. It was him who warned us about the "military-industrial complex", not hippies, and advocated for social welfare programs. The whole modern idea of "fiscal conservatism" is just that - modern. It's just as modern as LGBT rights, for example, literally, it's from the same time period - the 1960s and 1970s! You're talking about people who would PREDATE CAPITALISM. Your logic might hold to some extent for beings who lived 200 years, and whose views got set in stone in their 50s, say, but 500? 700? That's BEFORE CAPITALISM. It's before money was a huge thing at all. They'd think Adam Smith was a dumb whippersnapper, and would have prevented his ideas getting anywhere if they could manage it. You've got to think about this in a less "in the box" way. Everything post-3000 BC is potentially "off the table". That very much includes things like physical money. When money/wealth is like, a physical thing someone can make off with, that's disadvantageous to a very long-lived being, if it's using that money. They'd want to crack down on that sort of thing. They'd also want to crack down on any middle or mercantile class appearing, or on any religions which weren't their religion and so on. I'm not a big fan of the Malazan setting and I don't think it's well-handled in a lot of ways, but the author does at least attempt to grapple with some of this stuff, and it becomes clear that older mindsets, older ways of making way and so on are often just extremely dumb, and only work if you're incredibly magically powerful so that overrides the stupidity. [/QUOTE]
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