I... pfff.
I had this nice little follow-up to yesterday's post all planned out, continuing my, whatever the heck it was, about morality or whatever crap like that, not that it was crap, morality's not crap and I'm sure whatever it was I had to say was fairly dope, but I'm not even checking right now, because I know it's not the direction that I should really be spinning off on, and that's just some other post entirely now. I caught Imagining Zootopia today, and... and, well, dang,there's a lot in yesterday's post that was just set-up for my real original point, but I think it'd be alright to change focus for a bit to those initially incidental things.
A discussion of morality here, even in a different context from the original intent, leads to a tangent, with all my ideas three-quarters-baked at best, so I'll just say this: I mentioned General Conference, the LDS faith. Historically persecuted, persecuted in the present (though it comes and goes; lately there's been a rash of vandalism to churches it seems, alright just two incidents but both quite recently) because seen as persecutor (do those who call themselves tolerant, in shutting down those deemed intolerant, advancing the causes of tolerance?)which is it, God can say, -- now that same-sex marriage is legalized across the board, have we gone back to being harmless, I don't know, but-- Zootopia makes it clear that both predators and prey have their biases, and it's possible to be both, even as a divine institution, being led by imperfect people.
Preds in the original Zootopia drafts were given the "tame collars" ostensibly not to keep them subservient to prey, but to keep them in line for their own benefit, as a regulator for emotions to keep them from getting too, predatory, so that everyone can be happy and equal and nobody-lives-in-fear-hooray. You get angry, you get a zap. You get frustrated, you get a zap. You get excited, you get a zap.
It's really wild and sociologically lopsided and Harrison Bergeron-esque, how the attempt at homogenization of society only serves to exacerbate the differences; it's only the preds after all that get the collars, only preds who are expected by society to be incapable of autoregulation. We all live in paranoia! You of us, and us of, both you and ourselves! Politically (and this applies to the final draft as well, just highlighted here in these early drafts) it's like the race debate and the gun control debate had a kid, in which the minority race is born with guns for hands. Though I'm not sure how much sense that makes.
The idea of such a tame collar is hypothetically effective of course; in reality from what I've read about these kinds of practices studied in real life, the body and subconscious mind would quickly readjust itself to fit inside the parameters set for it, or in other words not only would the collar work but it would work too well.
Peeling back the layers away from that (and this is where we really dig into the themes brought up yesterday) with the emotionally numbing effect of the collar, it's this cultural assumption that emotion bad!! Like the introduction to yesterday's post, how people freak out when others show emotion, try to smother that like however. By saying I don't like your having negative emotions, you're in essence saying I don't like you having emotion at all, stop feeling things. It's not wrong to comfort others, but the way we go about it can reveal a cultural attitude (I think) not to regulate emotion, but to suppress it entirely.
And, though we're dealing with animals, which animals would be more human? Those who go through life unfeeling, lest they suffer the consequences of their displays of emotion? Or those who do feel, yet willingly perperate that system?
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