Website owner: James Miller
When we read stories (or novels) about honest, principled, honorable men (or women) we admire them and tend to imitate them. They become an idealization in our mind that we tend to copy. Thus reading the right kind of stories can have a good effect on us. Such stories can remold and remake our values, attitudes, and outlooks and build us into something higher and better (Examples: Pride and Prejudice's Mr. Darcy. Emma's Mr. Knightley. Anna Karenin's Levin). At the same time reading about low, despicable, immoral people also changes us --- in the opposite way. When one reads about low and immoral people one tends to sort of admire and idealize them and copy them. Low, immoral people also have values and ideals --- they enjoy, value and idealize deception, cheating, lust, adultery, etc. (i.e. badness). And when we read stories that romanticize bad people it tends to change us. We tend to copy them. Thus we tend to become what we read. It is not only books that tend to change us in this manner. Other things do it also. Like movies and television. And this is why it is so important to be careful about what we read, watch and listen to. Sept 1976
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