First you world build. You context the prompt succinctly by narrowing possible universes down to one. Then you provide a clean prompt designed to elicit a successful response in one try.
This is a case study in such a construction. The vignette needs a little editing but it is substantially what I wanted.
Symbolism.
Sign and significance:
Fleur de lis; the JudeoChristian ethic.
Leather bound book; the Byzantine ethic.
Chess set; intellectual culture.
Bicycle equipage; physical culture.
Lion symbol; alpha culture and legitimacy, ordination.
Candles; the Light of understanding countering the Darkness of mindlessness, the candle flickers but it does not go out.
Baroque music; complex mathematical models, order out of chaos.
Processing Information.
Humans learn in a complex risky process of aggregation, an espresso and a serious volume of nonfiction; integration, a traumatic reordering of synapses attempting a coherent brain mass; and generation, a creative phase involving a mild PTSD and intense cognition.
Then one learns these new generated ideas which triggers another cycle of integration and generation. This continues in a pattern of diminishing intensity until the brain is coherent to a stable database and paradigm repertoire.
Serious intellectuals then repeat the aggregation ad infinitum.
However what defines a serious intellectual is integration. A scholar mentality acquires a body of information and can repeat it but with a minimum of integration, just a cosmetic neurological exercise.
It is conceivable that a true intellectual could acquire too much sophisticated information and get lost in integration forever. John Nash, the gifted mathematician, attempted to learn theoretical physics in order to create a new synthesis. Einstein warned him that it was dangerous. It destroyed his mind and put him in an institution.
Actual synapses on actual neurons are a divide like the Grand Canyon between human and AI.
Consciousness.
Homo discretio:
Consciousness is the great crisis of Western Civilization. It should not necessarily be homo sapiens. It should be probably homo discretio, man (archaic) the discerning, the discriminator, the judge. Essential to being the measure of all things, the greater, the lesser, is self awareness, consciousness, making sense to oneself.
It becomes more obvious as the years go on that phenomenal numbers of people have no concept of making sense, in terms of self or otherwise. They deal instead in wheedling, behaviors that are successful at social purchase arrived at through behavior modification mechanisms. Making sense is irrelevant and unconsidered and therefore consciousness is abandoned. That is the genesis of hive mentality, what I call the swarm. It is not the human archetype of Western Civilization. It is different enough to differentiate a whole repertoire of behavior as alien to the psychological space of homo discretio.
It is no surprise that we differ one from another. It is the shock, as the historian Barbara Tuchman put it, of how much of what is human is alien to any one of us.
Culture.
Culture bound:
I learned to read when watching television. Seriously. I moved from that to reading in a set of Encyclopedia Britannica Junior volumes. I was ruined for the dictatorship of culture from then on. I would never be truly culture bound which is the mass industrial characteristic condition.
It is counterintuitive to be bound by culture in an Age of Information but it is how we negotiate that wealth of theory laden data that gives rise to the phenomenon. We lockstep in filter bubbles, staying well within our comfort zone, and knowing the same basic metaphysics as our circle of acquaintances. We are bound to a group culture. We are thralls to a dictatorship of a prescriptive filter that defines our possibilities and throttles our information down to a predigested pablum of factoids.
The sheer volume of information we deal with demands this be the case. We are primitives in a cognitive jungle of dense information, invoking constructs, superstitions, to explain a complex reality to a culture bound intelligence. Why?
Information overload has psychiatric consequences and the first psychiatrist was undoubtedly a lunatic. The mentally ill are uncomfortably aware of their limitations. Nobody wants to be insane. Therefore nobody lightly reads in a set of encyclopedias. I certainly didn't. I had a hunger to understand the world I lived in to the maximum possible extent, insanity be damned. My cultural predispositions were consumed in that fire of Aristotelian appetite.
Culture is then a comfortable refuge from reality. We learn it by having it forced upon our eager minds by an omnipresent didactic environment, teaching us the theory of the moment generating the facts that define, one scientific revolution away from madness.
Culture is the doorstep at which the responsibility is laid for the glorious successes of iconoclast rebels and the ignominious defeats of lockstepping thralls. It is our touchstone, our genius, and our prison.
Alpha homo discretio.
Tough guys:
Tough guys are not necessarily knock down thugs. The current Pope is a tough guy. Anyone exhibiting fearless moxie in any endeavor, including aesthetics and intellectual argument, is a tough guy,
Tough guys do not back down from confrontation. They might go around a contretemps in observing social convention but they do not weasel on the occasion of resistance or belligerence.
Alphas are all tough guys by definition. A tough is defined by physical interaction. A tough guy is not. Moral fiber constitutes tough guy status. It is a careful shading of nuance in the lexicon but it is a very real discrimination.
Counterculture.
Villains:
Villainy has been with us always. The Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, the first James Bond, vanquished villains. Villainy. Like most familiar phenomena it is rarely thought about, just taken at face value but it's worth a look.
The category comes to us out of two linguistic traditions, Latin and Old English with two synonyms, fiend and inimicus, both meaning enemy, both being essential to a definition of villain.
A villain was in its original usage simply a boor but has evolved powerfully to mean a vile person, a public nuisance residing in the person. It is often used analytically as in, ‘the villain of the piece’, the malefactor in other words. In an original neologism I characterize all my bad guys in my stories as antisocial-ists. It helps define their psychological space. It is a synonym for villains.
That's the basis for any discussion of ‘villain’ as it has come to be used. It is a slippery word that lacks rigorous definition which is what I intend to supply.
First, a villain is adrift. They are not about anything connected with any concept of humans and the universe. They are contras, against, against the very fabric of social existence. They are an intolerable vacuum of values.
Secondly, a villain is nonreferent. The word, from linguistics, means that they are context-free. Their world is made up for the moment.
Thirdly, a villain is socially inimical. They are destructively against social existence.
Fourthly, they are affective, proselytizing bizarre constructs of value and behavior.
As so defined they cannot but be a vile nuisance residing in the person. An archetypal villain in a creative piece must fall firmly into these criteria.
The Analytical Frame.
Meaning:
Indicates 'fit' into the puzzle of an abstracted reality. 'The' only has meaning in the structure of a sentence. Humans only have meaning when their behavior is relevant to, when it 'fits', personal and cultural abstracted myths of demonstrated truth value.
Quality of Life:
Possessed of a culturally referent objectified and significant interaction of certain aesthetic content with a high order (highly abstracted) reality. A psychological space of object and idea constituting both a reified and abstracted comfort zone and driving meaningful behavior.
Civilization:
Is an artifact of the a priori separation anxiety driven social existence of human beings which then drives a constant competitive leveling up of quality of life. There is no rationale for civilization, being driven by a priori mechanisms, the-thing-that-is-not, There are only ex post facto determinations of it having been brought into being, instants of the existence of exemplary, authored, quality of life.
The Purpose for Human Existence:
does not exist in a universal sense as one thing. It exists as possible motivations for possible evolutionarily valuable actions which differ from person to person, all of which depend on a coherent brain mass negotiating interests, quality of life solutions, with other brain masses and their interests, coherent and incoherent.
The Way of homo sapiens existence:
is the nurturing of an individual coherent brain mass of significant comprehension referencing a social standard or bar of performance and the deploying of it in pursuit of quality of life instants or interests.
Indoctrination can create a swarm effect or a collective consciousness but for every real instant of such a phenomenon there are a thousand instances of artifice and indoctrination.
The Prompt:
Write a thousand word noir scene or vignette involving a culture clash between a civilizado, the PI, and a nihilist villain. Use Dashiell Hammett as an influence.
Next the vignette...
Do Well and Be Well
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