Everybody is special
Tommi:
Last night I realized that the science fiction literature contains a serious flaw: its main characters tend to be famous and exceptional. When life in the future is comfortable, fewer people need to endure being famous or lead an eccentric life that conflicts with the rest of society. In the future everybody will be an ordinary middle-class person.
This development started a long time ago. In the ancient times kings watched special plays written for kings and dined on royal food served on plates decorated with diamonds. Today the President of the United States who is infinitely more powerful than any ancient monarch snacks on cookies while watching the exact same ballgame as his citizens. Whereas in the old times, a priest (or a teacher, a policeman etc.) had to live his whole life as a stiff-necked bore, modern priests can listen to rock music and drive motorcycles. From biographies you learn that any kind of innovation in science or arts was not possible without almost fanatic and monomaniacal devotion. Modern scientists and artists produce things that are vastly superior to the primitive, limited and clumsy culture of the past, and these men won't end their lives screaming in asylum but will occasionally even crack a smile. Even rock stars have become bourgeois.
We often overestimate people's desire to "be something". This desire didn't stem from some eternal need for self-aggrandization, but simply from scarcity. For any reasonable person, life as an ordinary schmo was poor, dangerous, sad, heavy and infinitely boring. Of course the science fiction genre or, as we say today, "speculative fiction" is more about allowing playing princess to lure girls to accompany nerds to movies than it is about any kind of thoughtful analysis of future. Sometimes I shudder to think about how much a person has to be off her rocker to want to play the role of a "beautiful, mystical, dangerous and infinitely strong" elf in some live action roleplaying game. At least the complete lack of sense of humour is a necessity so that she can prance around in her cloak without starting to laugh uncontrollably.
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