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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8765273" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's almost always a mistake to look at and try to analyze people as a group rather than an individual, and to that extent I agree.   There is no end of evils that have come out of analyzing a group and then apply a label to an individual based on group membership.   And when you are dealing with humans, whether you are dealing with them as individuals or groups, you'll find a lot of hypocritical and self-contradictory behavior.   It's rare to find an individual or a culture that is living up to it's stated beliefs.  All heroes, whether individuals or cultures, have feet of clay that can be and perhaps ought to be attacked to prevent idolization.   As an obvious example that hopefully will give no offense or spark no side conversation, the USA at the same time it was writing, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..." was also at the same time holding a significant percentage of its population in chattel slavery on the premise that those men weren't equal and endowed with the same rights.  And this extended even to the man writing the statement, who himself knew it to be true and knew his own slave ownership was immoral but lacked the courage to do anything about it.   And that's normal for humanity.  That's not just a one time problem specific to that time and culture. So reality is complicated.  Fantasy stories often try to tease apart that complexity so that we can think about the pieces of it, but even in a fantasy story once you put those pieces back together it still gets complicated.  Even in a Tolkien story Gondor isn't presented as wholly noble at any point, and much of the point of the story is even a figure like Frodo who represents at some level the best of us isn't wholly good and noble and none of the other figures representing what is best in humanity would have fared any better in that test.   We are all in some sense Gollum, the true Everyman of the story.</blockquote>

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