If you were the only man left alive, there would be no such thing as morality. Who exists for you
to wrong? Who exists whom you can make suffer? Who exists whom you can love as you love
yourself? Even if you had imaginary friends in this world where you were the only man alive,
there would still be no such thing as morality because how you regard non-sentient avatars,
even if these avatars represent sentient beings, says nothing about your character.
That I enjoy slaughtering imaginary villagers when I’m a Viking in my dreams does not make me
a killer at all or an immoral person. Nope, those villagers are guaranteed 100% for sure empty
shells, shells not even of a biological nature, but true formless shells, parts of the dreamland
fade. They are in fact figments of my own imagination. So in a dream, if I kill innocent villagers,
it is not really “immoral” unless you consider shedding off (or “killing”) aspects of yourself to be immoral.
If I root for bad guys in a movie, say, I root for the Tutsis in Hotel Rwanda to exterminate the
Hutus, I’m not rooting for the Tutsis to have exterminated the Hutus in reality. I’m rooting
for the imaginary Tutsis in the context of this movie story to murder these imaginary Hutus.
Rooting for the imaginary Tutsis is completely different from rooting for the real Tutsis. No
one should be afraid of anybody because of how they regard characters in fiction, characters
in fiction being creatures that are regarded as non-sentient shells by every sane person in the
world. You can’t actually wrong a non-sentient shell or make a non-sentient shell suffer or love
a non-sentient shell as you would love yourself.
But people are so stupid. People are so obsessed with appearances that they believe the only
moral person in the world is a goodie two-shoes hippie who lies in bed hugging puppies or
something. Nope, a moral man may wear a shirt that has a bleeding skull on it, and a moral man
may love to role-play as an evil one because he enjoys the appearance of violence and suffering
but not actual violence and suffering.
Violence and suffering are deeply emotional and engaging things that humans can relate to
at an instinctual level, and it is a testament to the morality of our culture that so many people
today abhor violence and suffering in all contexts except imaginary ones.
If our preferences regarding the real world and the fake world were locked into the same step
as each other, there’d be hardly any reason to have imaginations at all. There would be no
boundaries to cross in thought. Fiction would be an esoteric subgenre. We’d have all boring
non-fiction books. We wouldn’t be human.
The imagination is what allows us as human beings to always entertain ourselves. If we had the
kind of limited imagination where we couldn’t like something in fantasy that we didn’t like in
reality, I dare say we couldn’t be sentient. With sentience comes the capacity to imagine and
the possibility to imagine a being that’s sentient, and with the capacity to imagine this sentient
being comes the capacity to imagine violence against this sentient being, and with the capacity
to imagine violence against this sentient being comes the capacity to put that to paper or film
for everyone else to enjoy.
No one is a psychopath or a monster or a madman for liking that genre of entertainment.
Wishing for the imaginary Tutsis to exterminate the imaginary Hutus is about as harmless as
someone wishing for a marble to murder all the paper clips in the world. It says absolutely
nothing about a person’s true moral character.
Ed Reep
Editor-in-Chief