Thanks for this comment. I was both very moved by this post and unwilling to lean into it due to fears I couldn’t articulate. “fear of being eaten” is a pretty good match for what I was feeling, and having read the post I feel much more able to distinguish shadowmoth situations from being-eaten situations.
Some aspects that seem important to me for distinguishing between the two:
do you actually want the goal that struggling is supposed to bring you closer to? Did you choose it, or was it assigned to you? how useful is the goal to the non-helper?
how much work is the non-helper saving themselves by refusing to help you? In the shadowmoth case it was hurting the non-helper, which makes not-helping more likely to be genuinely for the moth’s benefit.
is the struggling recurring indefinitely, or is there some definitive endpoint? or at least, a gradual graduation to a higher class of problem?
can you feel something strengthening as you struggle?
is there reason to believe you’ll eventually be capable of doing the thing?
is this goal the best use of your limited energy? maybe someone should help you out of this cocoon so you can struggle against a more important one.
There’s also the question of the non-helper as an instance of a class, and you as an instance of a class, and the resulting implied ecology. Or to say it a different way: apply TDT to the shadowmoth / meal question. To say it a third way: if people like me react to situations like this—involving some relationship with someone or something—in such-and-such a way, then what trophic niche are we opening up, i.e. what sort of food are we making available for what sort of predator?
I had had individual thoughts like “of course in this case the alien woman is, you know, bad for kidnapping him and torturing him”, but the particular ecosystem frame feels probably-useful for generating followup questions. (It’s also thematically resonant with the themes in the book!)
This thread did motivate me to add an additional disclaimer to the post.
I was a miserable child. When I was nine years old I remember watching one and thinking “I have almost a decade left to serve. This is a long sentence for an adult and im just a kid. But at least I will get out one day”.
I was eventually set free. But until my freedom came all I could really do was bide my time and try to cope with the torture. And I most certainly consider it torture in retrospect. I was physically assaulted by my dad and I was horribly, horribly sleep deprived. But I managed to keep some of my sanity and pick up some MTG cards I later sold at a large profit. It could have been a lot worse for future me.
A thing I am interested in but can’t tell from this comment is whether, as that kid, reading this post would have been helpful or harmful (I’d guess harmful, but not overwhelmingly)
I greatly enjoyed this book back in the day, but the whole scenario was wild enough to summon the moral immune system. Past a certain point, for me it’s a safe default to put up mental barriers and actively try not to learn moral lessons from horror fiction. Worm, Gideon the 9th, anything by Stephen King- great, but I don’t quite expect to learn great lessons.
While rejecting them as sources of wisdom now, I can remember these books and return to them if I suddenly need to make moral choices in a world where people can grow wiser by being tortured for months, or stronger by
killing and then mentally fusing with your childhood friend. or achieve coordination by mind controlling your entire community and spending their lives like pawns
Though compare and contrast Dune’s test of the gom jabbar:
You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.
Even if you are being eaten, it may be right to endure it so that you have an opportunity to do more damage later.
I mean, we’re getting this metaphor off its rails pretty fast, but to derail it a bit more:
The kind of people who lay human-catching bear traps aren’t going to be fooled by “Oh he’s not moving it’s probably fine”.
Everybody likes to imagine they’d be the one to survive the raiding/pillaging/mugging, but the nature of these predatory interactions is that the people doing the victimizing have a lot more experience and resources than the people being victimized. (Same reason lots of criminals get caught by the police.)
If you’re being “eaten”, don’t try to get clever. Fight back, get loud, get nasty, and never follow the attacker to a second location.
I clicked the link hoping to expand the metaphor into some object level example that applied in this case but instead just found more metaphor (at least, I hope what I found was more metaphor) :P
A concrete example might be the story in your post. I’m not familiar with the book but from reading a summary, it sounds like Jacen was being eaten! And was convinced to collaborate with his own consumption by the very same shadowmoth story!
Sometimes yes, but also this is a great and common excuse to be eaten.
Thanks for this comment. I was both very moved by this post and unwilling to lean into it due to fears I couldn’t articulate. “fear of being eaten” is a pretty good match for what I was feeling, and having read the post I feel much more able to distinguish shadowmoth situations from being-eaten situations.
Some aspects that seem important to me for distinguishing between the two:
do you actually want the goal that struggling is supposed to bring you closer to? Did you choose it, or was it assigned to you? how useful is the goal to the non-helper?
how much work is the non-helper saving themselves by refusing to help you? In the shadowmoth case it was hurting the non-helper, which makes not-helping more likely to be genuinely for the moth’s benefit.
is the struggling recurring indefinitely, or is there some definitive endpoint? or at least, a gradual graduation to a higher class of problem?
can you feel something strengthening as you struggle?
is there reason to believe you’ll eventually be capable of doing the thing?
is this goal the best use of your limited energy? maybe someone should help you out of this cocoon so you can struggle against a more important one.
are you going into freeze response?
There’s also the question of the non-helper as an instance of a class, and you as an instance of a class, and the resulting implied ecology. Or to say it a different way: apply TDT to the shadowmoth / meal question. To say it a third way: if people like me react to situations like this—involving some relationship with someone or something—in such-and-such a way, then what trophic niche are we opening up, i.e. what sort of food are we making available for what sort of predator?
I found this a particularly helpful lens.
I had had individual thoughts like “of course in this case the alien woman is, you know, bad for kidnapping him and torturing him”, but the particular ecosystem frame feels probably-useful for generating followup questions. (It’s also thematically resonant with the themes in the book!)
This thread did motivate me to add an additional disclaimer to the post.
I was a miserable child. When I was nine years old I remember watching one and thinking “I have almost a decade left to serve. This is a long sentence for an adult and im just a kid. But at least I will get out one day”.
I was eventually set free. But until my freedom came all I could really do was bide my time and try to cope with the torture. And I most certainly consider it torture in retrospect. I was physically assaulted by my dad and I was horribly, horribly sleep deprived. But I managed to keep some of my sanity and pick up some MTG cards I later sold at a large profit. It could have been a lot worse for future me.
A thing I am interested in but can’t tell from this comment is whether, as that kid, reading this post would have been helpful or harmful (I’d guess harmful, but not overwhelmingly)
I greatly enjoyed this book back in the day, but the whole scenario was wild enough to summon the moral immune system. Past a certain point, for me it’s a safe default to put up mental barriers and actively try not to learn moral lessons from horror fiction. Worm, Gideon the 9th, anything by Stephen King- great, but I don’t quite expect to learn great lessons.
While rejecting them as sources of wisdom now, I can remember these books and return to them if I suddenly need to make moral choices in a world where people can grow wiser by being tortured for months, or stronger by
killing and then mentally fusing with your childhood friend. or achieve coordination by mind controlling your entire community and spending their lives like pawns
Though compare and contrast Dune’s test of the gom jabbar:
Even if you are being eaten, it may be right to endure it so that you have an opportunity to do more damage later.
I mean, we’re getting this metaphor off its rails pretty fast, but to derail it a bit more:
The kind of people who lay human-catching bear traps aren’t going to be fooled by “Oh he’s not moving it’s probably fine”.
Everybody likes to imagine they’d be the one to survive the raiding/pillaging/mugging, but the nature of these predatory interactions is that the people doing the victimizing have a lot more experience and resources than the people being victimized. (Same reason lots of criminals get caught by the police.)
If you’re being “eaten”, don’t try to get clever. Fight back, get loud, get nasty, and never follow the attacker to a second location.
I clicked the link hoping to expand the metaphor into some object level example that applied in this case but instead just found more metaphor (at least, I hope what I found was more metaphor) :P
A concrete example might be the story in your post. I’m not familiar with the book but from reading a summary, it sounds like Jacen was being eaten! And was convinced to collaborate with his own consumption by the very same shadowmoth story!
Okay yep fair’nuff.
Here’s a non-metaphor!
“Cryptobenthics do one thing particularly well: getting eaten.”
I guess the moral of that is, don’t be a cryptobenthic.