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Jun
28th
2017

An appraisal-based ontology of fiction · 2:13am Jun 28th, 2017

1. APPRAISALS

I was doing some consulting on “sentiment analysis” of tweets, which means making computers guess whether tweets say good things or bad things about whatever they’re talking about. This led me to The Appraisal Website and their appraisal ontology, which divides appraisals into 3 types:

  • Affect (emotion): evaluation by means of the writer/speaker indicating how they are emotionally disposed to the person, thing, happening or state of affairs. For example, `I love jazz'; `This new proposal by the government terrifies me'.
  • Judgement (ethics): normative assessments of human behaviour typically making reference to rules or conventions of behaviour . For example, `He corruptly agreed to accept money from those bidding for the contract'; `Our new classmate seems rather eccentric'.
  • Appreciation (aesthetics): assessments of the form, appearance, composition, impact, significance etc of human artifacts, natural objects as well as human individuals (but not of human behaviour) by reference to aesthetics and other systems of social value.

I stared at that for a bit, and it occurred to me that many stories could be seen as a conflict between different appraisals.

I thought about it a bit more, and it occurred to me that all dramatic stories could be seen as a conflict between different appraisals.

Not entirely all stories--not comedies, not existentialist stories like Waiting for Godot, not fictional histories like Last and First Men, not the half-stories we accept in poems and songs, and not the weird fairy tales we don’t tell.



2. STORY AS ARGUMENT; ARGUMENT AS CONFLICTING APPRAISALS

I claimed before that stories are moral arguments. Aristotle implied as much in The Poetics; moral argument was so central to the Greek way of thinking about drama that it seemed unnecessary to highlight it. To say that Aristotle thought a character in a story represented a system of ethics is not a strong enough statement; he used the same word (“ethos”) for both “character” and “ethics”. Dramatica theory says that a dramatic story is an argument for some approach to problem solving.

To bring appraisal theory and story theory together, first I need to fiddle with both the categorizations of appraisals, and the theory of story as argument.

One category of appraisal is conspicuously missing from The Appraisal Website: Correct or incorrect. If you say that hummingbirds migrate to South America, that’s a statement to appraise as correct or incorrect, not as pleasing, impudent, immoral, or beautiful.  I'll call this category 'reason'.

None of these categories are clear-cut.  Lovers, for example, may explain their affective appraisals of their beloved in terms of reason, or in terms of aesthetics, or be unable to tell the difference.  I have never found a principle on which to distinguish ethics from aesthetics. Debates over both ethics and aesthetics used to consist entirely of appeals to authority, and now both eventually appeal to evolutionary psychology. Both are areas where people hold strong preferences they imagine are their own, yet which they would reject if these preferences really were their own (ones they had invented or reasoned their way to), because both are areas where answers are supposed to be absolute, and understanding of their genesis, in the minds of most people, would invalidate them. [1]

So I will rewrite the categories of appraisals as,

  • Emotions
  • Ethics / Tradition / Aesthetics
  • Reason

These are (seems to me) the same three categories of methods of persuasion that Aristotle gave. If a story is an argument, the arguers will use one or more of these methods.

We have other approaches to deciding whether a thing is good or bad which Aristotle would not consider: religious approaches. These include at least faith and mysticism. We might add those in as well. Though an argument in favor of faith or mysticism is an oxymoron.

“An argument” can mean either one side or multiple sides of an argument. Pre-20th-century stories usually endorsed one side of an argument as correct; modernist stories often present multiple sides to show some problem as unsolvable. But we have spectacular exceptions, including the Iliad, Don Quixote, and (possibly) Hamlet [2]. I’ll say a story is an argument, and may represent many views on it, or endorse just one.

A story can have multiple arguments. A thematically-unified story may have several arguments, but they will all relate to each other.

  • To Kill a Mockingbird has two stories, one about Scout’s father’s attempt to get justice for a black man, and the other about Boo Radley, Scout’s neighbor, who is such a social misfit that he hasn’t left his house in 20 years. Both stories are about people who are feared and excluded from society.  Society has made an emotional appraisal leading to their rejection; the story argues for an ethical appraisal instead, and suggest this is the more-natural approach by showing that children don’t naturally exclude people that way but are taught to.
  • King Lear has a plot about Lear being betrayed by his daughters, and a subplot about Gloucester being betrayed by one of his sons.  Lear's original appraisal is purely emotional; he eventually learns that he should have used reason instead.
  • Lord of the Rings has numerous recurrent themes, such as the authority of elders; the authority of ancients; history as inexorable physical, intellectual, and moral decay; the immorality of technology; the dangers of pride, particularly the pride of consequentialist ethics; and the karmic justice, slow though it might be, of the universe. All of them fit together as aspects of Tolkien’s understanding of Catholicism and his love of the past.  Each of these themes is an argument that appraisals based on a traditional ethical code are not just morally superior to, but also more practical than, ones based on human reason.  This makes the entire trilogy essentially a defense of conservatism.

So, a typical well-written dramatic story consists of one or more arguments, each between at least two (nearly always just two) different value systems (ways of appraising the situation), which are emotional, aesthetic/ethical, or logical. Each major argument within the story will contrast the same two value systems and draw the same conclusion about them.

There are cases where one argument rejects the need for persuasion or justification, such as Satan’s admirable defiance in Paradise Lost, Catherine and Heathcliff’s love in Wuthering Heights, or Zarathustra’s bliss in Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Note that the two sides of an argument hardly ever use the same appraisal method.  It would be unusual to find a story putting two 'reason' arguments or two 'emotion' arguments in conflict.  This is a necessary consequence of Dramatica theory, because it says the argument should be made between characters who each represent a different aspect of a mind--often including a reason character and an emotion character, but not using two characters representing the same aspect simultaneously. (I didn't know that when I wrote this post in 2014.)

In other words, the theme of most stories is a single opinion, demonstrated in one or more arguments, contrasting two very broad approaches to choosing your values.

Personally, I think this shows that our literature is still quite primitive, choosing to argue over basic points of view such as reason vs. faith or conservatism vs. liberalism rather than to dig deeper into specific issues. That's playing the game in easy, stupid mode. There isn't any one method of valuation that's best in all situations, so you won't really learn anything except by looking at specific situations which stand for fairly specific classes of situations, not for all situations in general--and that would mean contrasting more specific approaches to valuation, e.g., one reasoned argument about a thing versus another reasoned argument. But it is rare in English fiction for a book to do that. Instead, they usually argue for or against reason, emotion, faith, mysticism, social consensus, or some other basis of value, in general.


3. ARGUMENT OR CONFLICT?

The main contending theory of story is that a story is about a conflict. An argument sounds a lot like a conflict, but we can find stories where the argument and the conflict in the story are different. Conflict theory is often stated as “man vs. man [individual conflict], man vs. society, man vs. nature, or man vs. self”.

A conflict theory analysis of Raiders of the Lost Ark would analyze the conflict between Indy and Belloc as “man vs. man”. That gets us nowhere in understanding the story. An argument theory analysis, however, could lead us to John August & Craig Mazin’s brilliant analysis of that conflict in Raiders as showing what will happen to Indy if he continues to value artifacts above people (he will become like Belloc). The conflict is over the Ark, but the argument is about which is more important, the woman or the Ark.

A conflict theory analysis of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” would call it a man vs. nature story. Again, this gets us nowhere. London's original, nearly-unknown version of this story was just that, man versus nature; conflict theory gives us no clue why the second version became so popular. An argument theory analysis would notice the repeated criticisms the narrator in the second version makes of the protagonist:

But all this—the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all—made no impression on the man…. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe…. At the man's heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolf-dog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man's judgment….

That man from Sulphur Creek had spoken the truth when telling how cold it sometimes got in the country. And he had laughed at him at the time!

The second version, but not the first, is a running argument between the man’s reasoned judgement that he can handle the cold (and he is knowledgeable and logical about it), and the dog’s traditional code of respect for the force of nature. That is why the story works.  Argument theory reveals it; conflict theory does not.

THE BRAVE LITTLE TAILOR

I can think of one large class of stories explainable by conflict theory but not by argument theory: “Brave Little Tailor” stories. There are many oral folk tales, all basically the same, that are variations on the Grimm Brothers’ “Brave Little Tailor”. Robert Heinlein even called it one of only four possible story types. A hero goes on a journey, is given three obstacles by a king, overcomes them by luck and wit, and marries a princess. (They may be the ancestors of picaresque novels of the 16th through 18th centuries, featuring low-class rogues who live by their wits.)

The fact that “takes a journey” and “marries a princess” are actual plot elements found in all stories of this type is one indication that this story type isn’t relevant to us today. The most-recent BLT story that I know of is “The Tinder Box” by Hans Christian Anderson (1835). People don’t really like brave little tailor stories anymore; or at least, if you write one, it won’t get published. The problem is that they have conflict, but no argument. Most people today find them boring, because the other side of the conflict is pure plot device. The king who poses the obstacles to the hero has no motivation and is not a real character. The hero triumphs without learning anything; there are no moral issues in the story and no moral at its end.

What does still count as a story today is the offspring of “The Brave Little Tailor” crossed with “The Lion and the Mouse”: A hero goes on a journey, encounters three people or animals, is kind to them, is given three obstacles by a king, overcomes them with the help of the three people or animals, and marries a princess. For example, “The Fool and the Flying Ship”. Sometimes the hero has two older brothers who try first, are not kind to the people or animals, and fail. This is a story because it has an argument, which contrasts the unkind older brothers with the kind younger brother, and argues that kindness to others will be repaid. So “The Brave Little Tailor” is the exception that proves the rule. Conflict was sufficient to make something a story in the Middle Ages; it was not to the Greeks, and is not today.

4. EXAMPLES

Emotion is better than Reason:

  • Harlequin romances could be assigned to this category. A man and a woman have conflicting goals and good reasons for not getting along.  Circumstances, however, force them together until they fall in love.
  • Star Wars:  Use the Force, Luke.  Switch off your targeting computer.
  • "Twenty Minutes": A zebra does the equine thing to do, despite its seeming stupidity and uselessness.

Emotion defeats Reason:

  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding: English schoolboys turn savage without adult supervision.

Emotion also beat Reason in the Harlequin examples, but those are happy endings, and the argument being made is that love is best as an emotional response, not that these particular two people must inevitability fall in love.  So in those stories, the more important theme is that Emotion is better than Reason when it comes to love.  Golding thought that reason was better than emotion for governing social behavior, but the point of Lord of the Flies is that Emotion still defeats Reason.  Hence I've phrased the category contrast as being about which one wins, rather than about which one is better.

Emotion versus Reason:

  • Don Quixote:  To be honorable, one must be mad.  It is not clear which is better.
  • Mortality Report:  Celestia considers her emotional ethics vs. Twilight's consequentialist ethics.

Here I've said "versus" rather than "is better than" or "beats", because the stories never come down on one side or the other.

Emotion is better than Ethics/Tradition:

  • Daisy Miller: The English narrator is entranced by Daisy Miller, a wealthy American young lady who does not understand British rules of propriety. The narrator is unable to get past the categories he is used to placing women in and instead dismisses her as a woman of low morals. As a (thematic) result, there is no place for her in this world, and she dies.

Emotion beats Aesthetics:

  • Edith Wharton, “The Daunt Diana”: An art critic inherits a fortune and is suddenly able to buy all his favorite artworks at once. He discovers possession brings him no joy, and sells them all so that he may hunt them down one by one. He thought he was ruled by his aesthetic sense, but really what he wanted was the thrill of the hunt.

Ethics is better than Emotion:

  • To Kill a Mockingbird: The narrator’s father wants equal rights for all, while most of the town believes the right thing to do is to keep negroes in their place. You could also call this Emotion versus judgement, because hatred (Emotion) and values (ethics) have a chicken-and-egg relationship in institutionalized racism.
  • “A Christmas Carol”:  Humanitarianism makes Scrooge happier than his untrammeled greed, which is revealed to be an emotional response to his own loss of his sister.

Tradition is better than Reason:

  • Jack London, To Build a Fire: A man goes out into the Canadian wilderness in winter, in weather that dips to 40 below zero (extra credit: Celsius or Fahrenheit?).  This is considered foolhardy by others, but he reasons to himself that he can handle it.  He gets wet. He struggles to build a fire to dry himself out, but dies before he can. People usually describe this as “man versus nature”, but that misses the point of the story, which is that the man was proud and foolish to believe that he could judge the danger of travelling alone in the Yukon in winter after only 2 years of living there. It contrasts the man’s pride with the narrator’s greater respect for the unpredictability of nature.
  • The Lord of the Rings:  See above.

Faith is better than Reason:

  • Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A bitter man ruminates on the cruelty of a society which operates by reason rather than by faith and mysticism.
  • Doctor Faustus by Thomas Marlowe.

Reason is better than Faith: Extremely rare, if it exists at all.

Reason is better than Emotion: Stories of this kind aren't allowed outside of fan-fiction and hard SF, especially if they endorse consequentialist ethics.  The entire thrust of 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century modernism was to demote science and reason below emotion (see the section in "How to Destroy a Civilization with Culture" on the Nazis for how that worked out).  Western philosophy and religion has rejected consequentialist ethics since before Plato. Anyone who publishes a story of this type will get crucified by the literary establishment.

  • Atlas Shrugged:  Reason is personified as business and industry; emotion is personified as those who wish to appropriate them.
  • "The Cold Equations":  A hard SF story in which the universe doesn't conspire to make the nice thing to do be the right thing to do.
  • "The Mailmare":  Derpy must choose between punishing the guilty and saving the world.

Reason is better than Aesthetics, but Aesthetics beats Reason:

  • This is a rare one, but Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita might qualify:  Humbert Humbert is an aesthete.  He attributes moral force to aesthetic judgements, and always manages to rationalize following his every desire.

Aesthetics beats and is better than Reason:

  • "Friends, With Occasional Magic": Lori (Lauren Faust) rewrites the depressing stories of her friends' lives as stories about ponies, in ways that give them hope.

Reason vs. Reason:

  • "Moments":  Twilight argues with herself over the most-rational response to the impending apocalypse.

Emotion vs. Emotion:

  • "The Gathering":  Celestia must choose between her love of her ponies, and her desire to be with her own kind.

The only stories I could think of which contrast two arguments of the same appraisal type are my own. As I said, I'm more interested in looking at specific cases than in arguing over which basic approach to epistemology to use. This puts me at odds with 20th-century literature.


  1. I’m trying to distinguish aesthetics from emotions. Emotions are qualia, things you experience directly. If you like the color blue, that’s not really an aesthetic judgement; it’s more of a feeling, like liking spinach. If you like Munch’s The Scream because it resonates with the suppressed anxiety of modern life, that’s an aesthetic judgement. There are borderline cases, say liking Starry Night or a Monet painting of lilies and not knowing whether it’s because of the composition or the colors. I’ll suppose that’s because a painting is complex, and our attitude towards it is a mix of different appraisals.
  2. The Iliad presents both Greeks and Trojans as noble, and its author was unsurprised that morals not only don’t prevent conflict, but may require people to slaughter each other. Don Quixote, often called the first European novel, is also sometimes called the first modernist novel, because it argues that one can at best be either ignoble and sane or else noble and insane, and that there is no resolution to this dilemma.
Comments ( 16 )

I will answer your extra credit: it doesn't matter.

Does anybody know how to get vertical whitespace both above and below the new [ hr ] tag?

No, no I do not. But I, too, would like to know, if anyone has the answer.

Also, it took you three years to post this? Wow.

4585196
It turns out I was looking at the blog preview, which displays the [ hr ] differently than the post does.

4585232
I was talking about the Fahrenheit versus Celsius question. At 40 below, they're the same.

4585234 Oh, right! Correct! I forgot that was in there. I wrote that bit in 2014.

Three of your links are broken, namely all of the non-Wikipedia and non-Fimfiction links except for the Appraisal website.

Interestingly enough, the average rate of link rot on the web is 5%. Since this post was constructed three years ago, that means this post should have about 15% link rot. There are 19 links total here so 3/19 = 15.8% rot. That's pretty damn close to the average.

But wait, there's more. Out of the 15 other links, 4 were to Wikipedia articles while the remaining 11 linked to either your stories or your blog posts. That means you control 58% of the rot yourself by dictating what remains visible on the site and what doesn't. Taking this into account, the link rot of this post would actually be 37.5%, more than double the average.

So in conclusion, Wikipedia is immortal, we control 100% of our past, I need to find something better to do with my time, and "more than double" = "Half-Life" and three broken links means...

Half-Life 3 confirmed?

4585270
You mad fool! You'll call down another delay upon us all!
Besides, links are basically connections from one space to another, and that's basically what a door is, and doors are portals, so we're obviously getting a Portal 3 confirmation here.
And the pages and posts are like little parts of a greater narrative, making them episodes, making it a confirmation for Episode 3 which will be a Portal crossover which segues into Half Life 3 itself.

Wheels within wheels, etc. The story of Ep3 will be Ethos vs Emotions as Freeman struggles with his desire to never do calculus again after Black Mesa but finding that he can't escape its necessity. Portal 3's story is a fast paced three way conflict of different aesthetic approaches to the design of experiments that need to engage a participant, but the third angle is heavily meta-narrative second person sections which draw it out of "science" as an abstract framing device and into the design of video game marketing in a way that somehow manages to remain familiar and charming despite being obvious late development rush in full force.

The story of Half Life 3 itself is intentionally structured to be incompatible with any systems referenced by Bad Horse in particular, because Gabe Newell is actually a very petty sorcerer and is making a point that we'll struggle to understand for years to come.

  • “A Christmas Carol”:  Humanitarianism makes Scrooge happier than his untrammeled greed, which is revealed to be an emotional response to his own disappointment in love. the death of his sister.

Note that his fiance leaves him because he has become greedy--she says as much. This shows that his greed began developing before he became disappointed in love.

Dickens underplayed the death of Scrooge's sister to such an extent that it's easy to miss. The reason for this, I think, is that if he'd played it up more, people would have had more sympathy for Scrooge ("Why, he's only bad because he's sad!") from that point on in the story and that would have lessened the impact of Scrooge's emotional and moral journey.

I find this pretty useful. A lot of writing advice or story analysis of narrative arcs goes on about characters making choices, that turning point where "there's no turning back!" until there are no more choices to make. However, the tradition of boiling a story down to only a conflict feels incomplete. A conflict by itself isn't about choice, it's about who wins & loses. A character doesn't choose to win. But an argument, now that's where choice comes into play. I think when people read stories, why a character does something sticks with us more than what they do.

though for a while, I've had to expand my definition of "conflict" to make all this fit within Conflict Theory. they're not external conflicts, they're internal conflicts! it gets a little messy organizing them that way, explaining multiple conflicts within a single story, so I think splitting them into conflicts and arguments might work better... maybe. they seem so strongly linked to each other, even if they're not always the same. is it possible to have a dramatic story with an argument, but no conflict?

I used to work in information retrieval (IR) and I looked at sentiment analysis as a possible research topic. There's interest in getting a more fine-grained interpretation of the mood of text than positive or negative (like happy, sad, sarcastic, etc.) but at the time it was a hard problem that hadn't seen much progress. I haven't looked at it since 2008~ish or so, but I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if there have been any major advancements since then.

The problem is that human language is so incredibly contextual. If somepony who speaks Mandarin as a first language and knows the meaning of every word and expression in English—but doesn't speak it—can't accurately determine fine-grained sentiment of a decent proportion of text, it's a fair bet a computer will have a hard time at it too.

Reason is better than Faith:

  • The Golden Compass? I haven't read it.

The Golden compass is actually about "Emotion is better than Faith". The big climax of the story is two teenagers in love "reenacting the fall of man" (AKA fucking) in defiance to a strict religious order, which is closely related to God dying, thus freeing the universe. There are also multiple other places where the story centers around religion preventing people from behaving and feeling how they actually want.

On another note: I'd argue that stories about Nihilism/Meaninglessness provide a fourth value axis, since they often denounce all other virtues and values as inconsequential.

I think you're trying too hard to fit things into a single pigeonhole. Who says that some stories can't be about arguments, others about conflicts, and still others about other things entirely?

I mean, look at your section about Lord of the Rings:

Lord of the Rings has numerous recurrent themes, such as the authority of elders; the authority of ancients; history as inexorable physical, intellectual, and moral decay; the immorality of technology; the dangers of pride, particularly the pride of consequentialist ethics; and the karmic justice, slow though it might be, of the universe. All of them fit together as aspects of Tolkien’s understanding of Catholicism and his love of the past. Each of these themes is an argument that appraisals based on a traditional ethical code are not just morally superior to, but also more practical than, ones based on human reason. This makes the entire trilogy essentially a defense of conservatism.

I'm not sure that calling Lord of the Rings an argument for much of anything is really all that coherent, because I don't think it is a coherent argument for anything. It makes use of a lot of trappings of older stories for its own purposes, but in the end, it is really an adventure story (and a vehicle for world-building).

I mean, if you asked most people what Lord of the Rings was about, I don't think they'd come up with it being a defense of conservatism.

Conversely, if you asked a lot of people about what To Kill a Mockingbird was about, I think that most people would tell you that it is about racism.

You could argue that Lord of the Rings is just a poorly written argument, but I think there are a lot of stories that a lot more like Lord of the Rings than To Kill A Mockingbird, and I think suggesting that all those stories are bad stories is problematic.

I think some stories use arguments as a window dressing for the core plot, to make it feel more significant, and some stories use plot as an vehicle for their argument, to make their argument feel more correct.

4591731
I think you've picked a particularly bad example. LotR keeps bashing you over the head with its conservatism. It doesn't make a logical argument for conservatism; it makes a rhetorical argument for it--but it's definitely an argument in favor of conservatism. The old ways are best; the old races are best; the old craftsmen were the best; old magic is more powerful; technology is bad; race and breeding determine character; virtue ethics beat consequentialism and reason; women are unimportant unless they act like men.

I mean, if you asked most people what Lord of the Rings was about, I don't think they'd come up with it being a defense of conservatism.

I am surprised to find you using the "most people" argument. I find it unpersuasive.

4592047

I am surprised to find you using the "most people" argument. I find it unpersuasive.

If most of the people who read your work don't understand the argument you're making, wouldn't that mean that your argument isn't very good?

I'm not really convinced that his argument is about conservatism at all, though. Did he ever say that it was?

If I was going to suggest it had arguments, I would suggest its themes would be the temptation and corruption of power, and the heroes are heroes precisely because they can resist the temptation of abusing power. Also that people, no matter how small, can make a difference in the world if they find the courage to do so.

I mean, while the old races may all be totally awesome, in the end it is the hobbits, who are noted by the story itself to be pretty unremarkable and rather quaint quite a bit, who end up saving the day, not the dwarves or the elves or Gandalf or what have you. The hobbits' idea of grandiose history is paltry compared to that of the other races, and yet they show equal if not superior courage for all that.

4592286

If most of the people who read your work don't understand the argument you're making, wouldn't that mean that your argument isn't very good?

If you write a novel, and most of the people who realize it understand the argument you're making, I would be more inclined to think that would make it a bad book. I would even say that if you write a novel, and you understand from the beginning what argument you're making, it's probably a bad book.

But even if you write a straight-out allegory, most readers will still miss your meaning. Even if you state things directly, without metaphor, many will still miss your meaning. People are stupid. You know that.

I'm not really convinced that his argument is about conservatism at all, though. Did he ever say that it was?

I doubt that he was aware of it. He was a Catholic and a medieval scholar at Cambridge who had little opportunity to talk with people who weren't arch-conservatives. When I read essays by that general crowd--Tolkien and Lewis and Chesterton--they seem unaware of their own assumptions and of the allegorical aspects of their writing. CS Lewis said The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe wasn't meant to be Christian; it just came out that way.

 I would suggest its themes would be the temptation and corruption of power, and the heroes are heroes precisely because they can resist the temptation of abusing power. Also that people, no matter how small, can make a difference in the world if they find the courage to do so.

Yes, those are also important themes to it. I was over-simplifying.

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