He had no reason to suspect that he, uniquely, was the only one who had felt the meaning of the dance. Two-Crossed-Fingers had no reason to suspect that, unlike him, all twenty-two other tribespeople were just going through the motions, and they each had their own clumsily patched-together notion of things.
When I first read this, I read it as an unreliable narrative describing what the boy would think if he knew what the other tribespeople interpreted the dance (ie, “I know the true meaning! Everyone else is wrong!”). But the way that the boy does not become grateful when rescued from the pit suggests, in some ways, there’s more to this.
The boy turned the lamp off so that only a thin sliver of light made it through the flap, and proceeded to do the strangest little dance. Even in the darkness, it was such a grotesque and unnatural series of motions to my eyes, joints bent in all the wrong angles, that I reflexively cast my eyes away.
The dance is unnatural, yes. And life in the pit is actually bad. And this boy, the youngest, happens to be more separated from the world beyond the pit than any others—another generation removed. Maybe this was the point at there was nothing left of the world beyond the pit, and the boy’s brain had no residue of that world to latch onto. So instead, it contorted into the best shape that fit the pit—a shape that could barely fit into the world beyond it.
In the context of ethics, it’s interesting to think about the ways that our minds grow into the shape of our environments and its especially interesting to think about the way adversarial environments can trap our minds in the wrong shapes—leaving us with perverse value systems. You could argue that ethics are subjective but that’s not the point. The boy could’ve had a better life outside the pit had his mind been capable of understanding that possibility than even life inside the pit with a mind that had been shaped to fit it. Reminds me a little bit of Three Worlds Collide in that way. It kind of makes sense—this is also a first contact story, in a way.
When I first read this, I read it as an unreliable narrative describing what the boy would think if he knew what the other tribespeople interpreted the dance (ie, “I know the true meaning! Everyone else is wrong!”).
But the way that the boy does not become grateful when rescued from the pit suggests, in some ways, there’s more to this.
The dance is unnatural, yes. And life in the pit is actually bad. And this boy, the youngest, happens to be more separated from the world beyond the pit than any others—another generation removed. Maybe this was the point at there was nothing left of the world beyond the pit, and the boy’s brain had no residue of that world to latch onto. So instead, it contorted into the best shape that fit the pit—a shape that could barely fit into the world beyond it.
In the context of ethics, it’s interesting to think about the ways that our minds grow into the shape of our environments and its especially interesting to think about the way adversarial environments can trap our minds in the wrong shapes—leaving us with perverse value systems. You could argue that ethics are subjective but that’s not the point. The boy could’ve had a better life outside the pit had his mind been capable of understanding that possibility than even life inside the pit with a mind that had been shaped to fit it. Reminds me a little bit of Three Worlds Collide in that way. It kind of makes sense—this is also a first contact story, in a way.