Society should regret the common narrative of good triumphing over evil in children's entertainment

Thanks again to ShabShoral for debating with me on this. 1. Creativity Fostering creativity in children in our society is a necessity. Creative thinking is important for the generation "of new ideas, perspectives, concepts, principles and products in our society." It plays a substantial role in the production of new inventions and the founding of new businesses, and in order to build that creativity, it must be fostered in children.[1] Intellectual property sectors alone are "estimated to be worth $360 billion a year".[2] "Creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status. Furthermore, creativity is basic to making our society viable because without we would lose our competitive edge".[3] " There are numerous ways in which we attempt to foster creativity in education. There are varying degrees of success in those endeavors, and we could certainly discuss them endlessly. What we must recognize, though, is that these efforts will never be perfect. Teaching and parenting can always improve, and, depending on the child, creativity can always be fostered in better ways. So we need to recognize incremental improvements where they exist, and encourage changes that produce those improvements. Children are learning from a great deal of what they interact with on a day-to-day basis, and we need to recognize how that influence affects them. They absorb entertainment through all manner of media, and in the process garner some idea of what it looks like to be creative, i.e. what creative minds of previous generations have produced. When they see a new concept, that becomes another lens through which they can view the world. When they're exposed to the same lens time and time again, it becomes stagnant, boring. As with any trope, it becomes so rote and expected that readers can predict much of the structure of any given story. Entertainment should endeavor to be a medium that fosters creativity. Considering the massive amount of time that children spend engaging in electronic media, they clearly play a substantial role in child development. This amounts to 7.5 hr. a day on average, which means this basically amounts "to a full-time job, dwarfing the amount of time spent in school. [4] There is no reason to believe that this will change, and as such, no reason to doubt that the influence of the entertainment industry on the lives of children will remain high. As such, we as a society should regret when that influence negatively affects creativity, and I would argue that presenting them with the good vs. evil trope does exactly this. Why? Because "[c]reativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas."[5] Continuously presenting a good and evil dichotomy doesn't feed into either kind of thinking, instead pushing the idea that creativity can only happen within clear, defined limits. In doing so, it limits creativity. This bears out in quantitative ways. In fact, even as IQ scores have gone up, we've seen creativity quotients, or CQs, decrease in the U.S.[5] While that decrease cannot be solely tied to one specific trope, it is nonetheless clear that video games, television, books and other media can improve a person's creativity.[6-9]. Tropes like good vs. evil limit the access of children to new and interesting ideas by only presenting extremes, and thus limit the means by which that creativity can be enhanced. By focusing on this trope, entertainment media is doing a blatant disservice to society. They deny access to fresh ideas in the short term, and thus reduce access to new innovations and businesses in the future. That can have untold effects for every industry. "A healthy society requires that we cultivate the next generation of innovators to maintain economic competitiveness, to solve deep-rooted social problems and to create objects of beauty that inspire."[10] An important part of that cultivation requires that we improve CQs, and one of the most important places to do that is through entertainment media. If nothing else, society should reject what stifles creativity for the sake of encouraging creative problem solving, which reduces the incidence of individuals considering suicide. We should seek to give children as many means as possible to address problems in their lives and reduce their despair, which is only possible if they can creatively devise a wide variety of solutions.[11] Society should regret the incidence of despair and lost innovation, and thus support means of enhancing creativity. 2. Real-world learning The conflict of good versus evil is a binary of extremes. Ignoring moral relativism, let"s assume that good and evil can be clearly delineated. Even assuming that"s the case, to paint a whole character " all actions and motivations included " as good or evil is an extreme that scant few people can possibly meet. Much as many of the actions we take may be selfless and considerate, those individual actions don"t make a person holistically good, just as actions that show cruelty or selfishness don"t automatically make a person evil. Designating a person as good or evil turns them into a caricature of a person, reducing them to a static state, charactertizing them and not their actions as "good" or "evil." In doing so, we are "surrendering our intellectual responsibility to analyze their actions."[12] And this is part of our moral duty. We need to understand what feeds into evil actions, in particular, in order to understand what feeds into them. Addressing root causes, like child abuse, a generally violent society, or psychological disorders, is the only means by which we address actions we could generally agree cause harm to society like domestic violence, poverty, homelessness, and violent behaviors of all kinds.[13-15] The more we treat good and evil as static, unchanging states, the more we ignore these causes and continue to endure these harms. Intent is also an important part of how good and evil should be perceived. We must recognize that scant few individuals perceive themselves as evil. Regardless of the action, an individual is likely to view themselves as an agent of morality.[16] We can impose societal views of morality to characterize them as evil, but in doing so, we merely demand that they ascribe to another subjective view of morality. Entertainment that seeks to paint one side as good and the other as evil imposes similarly subjective views of what constitutes these two terms on not only the characters, but the audience as well. The mindset that good always triumphs over evil by itself suggests an air of finality: we have defeated a given agent or group of agents of evil, ergo that evil is now itself defeated. It masks the underlying problems that caused these "evil" people to act as they do. It also suggests that good is always victorious. Actual conflicts are rarely so clearly divided at all, and they certainly do not always end with a perceived "good" winning out over a perceived "evil." In portraying this oversimplified perspective, children are being given a warped perception of the world that allows greater problems to go unaddressed and slants views of moral rightness on the basis of success alone. All of this matters because the world we present to children is the world that they perceive. People who are brought up under the perception that every character or even a substantial portion of characters are good/evil are likely to try to imprint that understanding on the world around them. As such, they idealize those they view as good, and distance themselves from those they view as evil. In the former case, that means allowing actions that would otherwise be treated as evil, ain the latter, that means othering and refusing to understand those who disagree with them. It"s much simpler to simply dismiss them as irredeemably evil, which matches the narrative they have been hearing since early in their lives. This is the impetus for all manner of conflicts. Morals clash on a regular basis, telling us that multiple choices can be good or bad for different reasons, yet the stark view of good vs. evil, and the need to defeat said evil, doesn't allow for nuanced discussions of moral differences. Instead, it pushes us to dismiss and even hate those with different views, these "others." Not only does this lead to initiating and prolonging conflicts, but it also leads us to feel no guilt about bad treatment of those individuals. This is part of the Benjamin Franklin effect: "If we"re experiencing guilt about our treatment of some person, or group, or class, and having trouble reconciling that guilt with our notion of ourselves as good people, our brains are extremely adept at resolving the situation by othering the people we feel that we"ve wronged. If we dehumanise someone, and distance our empathy with them, then we won"t have to feel bad about the shabby way we"ve treated them...learning to avoid and counteract these thought patterns is integral to greatly reducing the world"s hatred and suffering."[17] Thus, in partitioning the world into two camps and placing ourselves in the "good" one, we have fundamentally damaged our ability to see morality in even our own actions. If we wish to address and counteract the hatreds and suffering that accompanies such othering, then the place we need to start is with how children are educated about the dynamics of good and evil in the world. 1. http://bit.ly... 2. http://bit.ly... 3. http://bit.ly... 4. http://bit.ly... 5. http://bit.ly... 6. http://bit.ly... 7. http://bit.ly... 8. http://bit.ly... 9. http://bit.ly... 10. http://nyti.ms... 11. http://bit.ly... 12. http://bit.ly... 13. http://bit.ly... 14. http://bit.ly... 15. http://bit.ly... 16. http://bit.ly... 17. http://bit.ly...