Steering People With Aesthetics

In the 1980s culture wars, the game of Dungeons and Dragons regularly featured as a villain that was tempting children into the ways of satan. My dweebie friends and my dweebie young teen self played the game on a weekly basis. D&D was really like an extension of sci-fi and fantasy novels and an exercise in shared active imagination, which children are generally pretty good at through years of practice in games and playing with toys. Religions are actually pretty similar on that score. A congregation and a people share a base of imaginative stories that are elaborated over time, but for the typical churchgoer, the religion "game" is more passive. I think the critique of D&D by christian conservatives of the day was actually correct in some ways.

D&D grew out of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and works by writers of the Lovecraft circle who were tied into Theosophy. The world of fantasy, for them, was real and malleable and where the future could be made.

Many people, but especially children, evaluate information through aesthetics. Since they don't have any actual experience, they can't make judgements any other way. If a kid sees a cool car, they'll react to its shape, the sound the engine makes, and how shiny it is. If an adult sees a politician on a stage surrounded by a crowd, they'll react to the apparent social circumstances of a person being "important" rather than evaluate whatever nonsense is being said. The play violence of kids pretending to be knights or cowboy gunfighters seems like the model lay people have of wars.

An aesthetic understanding is more primal than attempts at rational understanding and probably relies on evolutionary "memories" that people have. The chrome and cooling fins and shiny paint of motorcycles conjure up the slick colors and patterns of reptiles and birds. Leathers and helmets of street racers cover up their human features, which as far as animals go are pretty jumbled and muddled, and reduce them to a simple clear forms.