556 – Societies That Ban Things
Description
We’ve all been there: The plot is going well, but your hero is solving problems too easily because of their cool magic powers. Couldn’t you fix it by making their society ban cool magic powers? Technically, yes, but there’s a lot that goes into such a decision. Why would they ban something as useful as magic? For that matter, why would everyone be organized into factions based on their birthstone? As you may have guessed, we have some thoughts.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Aiden. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening theme]
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I am Chris…
Oren: And I’mOren.
Chris: This is a secret podcast because we live in a culture where vocalizing is forbidden.
Oren: Ooh, so scandalous.
Chris: It goes back to the great singing wars, where two kings got in a big fight over who had a better voice. So, to prevent that from ever happening again, everyone decided: no talking. But we’re very brave rebels, because we think that we should be able to talk and it makes us outcasts and we’re hunted.
Oren: It’s also somehow… we’re actually very good at it, despite supposedly being in a culture where no one ever talks. Don’t worry about that part.
Chris: We had this awakening a couple of years ago where we discovered talking for the first time and it was very profound.
Oren: But, we decided to invent English. So, honestly, maybe we are the bad guys.
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: You had a blank canvas of infinite choices and you decided a language that spells “GHT” to be either silent or an “F” sound. Why are you like this?
Chris: [laughter] It is funny that there was a period in time when the first English dictionaries were being created, where some people writing things down made some very arbitrary decisions about how they wanted to spell things, sometimes just to match other words that were also spelled very strangely, and that’s it! Standardised spelling is only a couple of hundred years old.
Oren: And that’s how we got to where we are today. Personally, I know that if I was going to make an unrealistic world where things are forbidden, what I would do is I would have one faction that just won’t shut up about free speech and just screams about it, and every time someone mildly criticizes them they scream about free speech and then when they’re in power they immediately start trying to ban peoples’ speech. If I wanted it to be really unbelievable, I would do that, is what I’m saying.
Chris: Oh, no! Oren, too real!
Oren: That’s just an unrealistic fictional expectation, Chris. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Chris: I mean, I do think there’s a fun conversation (and sometimes not fun conversation) to be had here about which things are realistic for culture to forbid and which things are not.
Oren: What it comes down to is, you have to think about who is trying to forbid this and why. That’s what it comes down to and people try to forbid things all the time and there are various reasons they might do that. Sometimes, these are good reasons, like the taboo against teachers dating their students: this is a good thing to have. Some authors don’t understand that some taboos are a good thing to have and they think that if it’s cool and rebellious to break taboos against interracial dating, it must be cool and rebellious to break student-teacher dating taboos and it’s like no, that taboo exists for a reason; it’s because that is an inherently unequal relationship. Also, often it’s just they want to control people. You ban stuff that you don’t want people doing. That can be a good motivation, it’s just a question of who has a vested interest in doing this, right? Like banning talking is extremely unlikely just because it would be unworkable and would almost certainly fail, even if someone tried.
Chris: The other thing about why would somebody do this, again is the unworkability. Some things are just too burdensome. You could have tyrants, but people do have to choose to obey. And if everybody is universally unwilling to obey because it’s just too much, then it’s not going to work out. Like Prohibition in the United States: that wasn’t the most unreasonable law. We’re learning more and more that even a tiny bit of alcohol is bad for you and apparently, before Prohibition, the thing that people don’t realise is that we drank a lot more. It actually did something good in that it reduced how much people drank. But, at the same time, it was completely unworkable because nobody was willing to actually follow it.
Oren: And of course, it caused a huge spike in organised crime; to some extent it invented organised crime. Prohibition is complicated and the idea of it just being this silly idea that nobody liked and then that we got rid of after a few years is overly simplistic. But it is a good example of how there are things that are just too ingrained, too successfully bad. At least in some cultures, right? It’s culturally different. There are cultures that have largely abandoned alcohol, it’s just not ours.
Chris: [laughter] And again, maybe it comes down to how much people drank before Prohibition: a ridiculous amount. Some other things that are just unworkable, that are still things that fiction likes to feature is forbidding emotion, or love, or – and we talk about this all of the time – magic.
Oren: Yeah, I’d love to ban magic. That’s just a thing everyone does, because you need your hero to be mistreated for something cool and awesome and not a boring sad reason that people actually get mistreated.
Chris: Don’t get me wrong, if you actually wanted to make banning magic to be something that could happen and you only have cosmic horror magic that always lashes back and does terrible things, or if you quit gains, that could be plausible. But, most magic that people have, it’s not what people want. They have their cool, pressed mages.
Oren: And you can come up with narrower circumstances. There are situations in which certain kinds of magic might be banned. Of course, often what authors will do is they will set up very good reasons for that magic to be banned and then be like, “oh, but it’s wrong to ban that magic.” Is it though? You made a pretty compelling case for it earlier. You an also have situations where it’s roughly parallel to the modern attempt to ban renewable energy, where there is a very entrenched group of powerful people who rely on one kind of magic and they see another kind of magic as a threat. They might try to ban that; that could happen.
Chris: Definitely one group banning things from another group or something to protect their interests, that is very realistic. Again, as long as it’s not at the unworkable level; it’s what many stories want.
Oren: Even in those situations where there is one group doing it for their own interests, very often, if the thing they’re trying to ban is useful, they will still find ways to use it. There was this infamous scene from the show Landman where this guy just spouts a bunch of oil industry propaganda for five minutes. He does make one point that is true, which is the oil industry doesn’t have any problem using wind turbines when it is practical for them to use turbines to get oil out of t
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