Rowling and totalitarianism

J.K.Rowling had a job before she wrote Harry Potter.

Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

She has seen the evidence of things we in civilized nations are mostly sheltered from. Things she says we need to imagine.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read. …

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

Frank Warner goes on to say:

Give a nation twenty years of prosperity, and a quarter of its people will believe prosperity takes no work.

Give a nation twenty years of peace, and a quarter of its people will believe peace comes from ignoring enemies.

Give a nation twenty years of freedom, and a quarter of its people will lose the ability to imagine the misery of a life in chains.

We in the Free World have been given so much that many of us have lost the feel for real suffering. Somehow we’re able to play pretend, and yet too many of us have lost our imaginations.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the civilized Western world is an anomaly in human history. It is a delicate balance of factors, and if you destroy the balance in one of them, you risk the entire structure falling to pieces.

Imagine that.