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text from Terry Pratchett; art by Higgs who's tumblr i've linked
i can't rember which book this is from -- i wanna say it's Men at Arms but it could even be Guards Guards. Higgs seems to think it's Night Watch, but I'm pretty sure it happened before that...
in the post here
You're welcome!
Maybe one of these days I'll do a mega-post on Pratchett and the general socio-political and philosophical ideas he promotes through his fiction. He's been my favorite fiction author for more than twenty years now, and I think only Brennan Lee Mulligan has managed to even come close to capturing the level of wit and sensitivity through fiction, although Brennan has never written a book. Prachett, especially in his prime years of the late 90's and early '00s, really has a magical way of making you laugh and then smacking you over the head with some profound philosophical bullshit that is much more sophisticated than it has any right to be.
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Absolutely. Terry Pratchett was very much of the opinion in his works that if we are going to reorganize society, it must be around (unsurprisingly) supporting independent geniuses and artisans, but somehow never letting them take over society because they are far too insane to be trusted for management. But that being said, he also recognized that there are ultimately forces outside of your control that dominate trends, artistic creations, and archetypes, usually as exemplified through Magic, most notably in Moving Pictures and Soul Music, and also recognize the crass consumerism attached to such movements, usually exemplified by CMOT Dibbler. But even then, Dibbler is more of a side-nuisance than an actual threat or the root of the problem (and is seen as a universal force in every culture rather than particular to economies-of-scale). The problem is that the 'Magic' is powerful and alluring, but also self-centered, possessive and destructive. But that being said, there is a difference in T.P. between Magic and magic, as usually exemplified by the difference between wizards and witches of which T.P. universally sides with the witches. Wisdom, for him, is the ability to recognize when Magic is happening and stop it from fucking stuff up, but then using and experiencing magic in your day to day life. T.P. is full of dualisms like this, where things are the same but different.
He also moved away (or made more complex, depends on your interpretation of the work, as things like the God of Evolution once again follow that dualistic model) from these conceptions of society in his later works, particularly in Going Postal and Making Money (where he literally theorizes a labor-value currency through a golem-based currency, which ultimately undermines itself when anyone can control the golems), but even then, those are all generally failed trends facilitated by either 'Technology' or 'Magic'. The big thing is that T.P. mostly finds everything about society and people in general to be pretty absurd, which is why I enjoy him. As you said, whatever brainworms he had, his ability to recognize and chart the absurd will always have me coming back to his books.
I have read the long earth trilogy! It's an interesting series, but not as interesting as something like Good Omens.