The Masquerade: tired cliche or inevitable reality?

I notice many threads here are about how the masquerade is a tired, overdone cliche associated with hack writers. It is kind of a dead horse in the wake of Harry Potter's crushing popularity and given how poorly thought out both that and most of its followers are, it's really easy to mock and pick apart. It's a conceit that lends itself to way too many hypothetical situations that you can't possibly address over the course of any satisfying story and nearly all of them make the masquerade seem implausible. Rather than trying to justify it the way most authors do, I'm instead going to offer the challenge that breaking the masquerade is way, way harder than even the most overwrought "the humans must never know!" story presents maintaining it. Want to know why?

Television, advertising, and conspiracy crank culture can maintain almost any masquerade.

Imagine fairies appear in a major city. Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, anywhere. They're seen on live television flying around, interacting with people, casting spells, etc. Would you come to the conclusion these are real fairies? Of course not. Modernized fairy tales are the latest fictional trend and there are a few TV shows on the air. Who is to say this isn't a publicity stunt for the upcoming Once Upon a Time finale? Hell, if the company breaking this story is ABC, you already know it's suspect. We also know we can't trust the footage because special effects are way too good and there have been so many other hoaxes over history. How often have you read about a so-called "viral video" being staged? Since fairies have never really existed until just today, it can only be a fake.

Suppose, then, that fairies appear in several major cities. Wouldn't it be easy to claim this is a large marketing push? Large and small towns? Very large marketing push. But then, what if they appear in Somolia? Clearly, they don't have a whole lot of disposable income over there to watch an American television show based on a cultural identity they just don't have. Still, you wouldn't believe it to be true, would you? Somolia has no central government, no formal education, and there's a lot of superstition on the continent. It is the place that believes virgins cure AIDS, after all. Surely, it must be the work of an unusually creative militia group trying to wring resources out of a gullible public. Failing that, it could still very well be a marketing stunt, anyway.

But let's think about sources here. What if, instead of a mainstream news group, it's your government spreading the videos and announcing their existence. Do you trust your government completely? Politicians are known to lie and manipulate people's emotions. There are large agencies steeped in espionage and extensive secrecy. No matter where you live, the government wants more control over your life and will seek out new and creative ways to get it. You've read about them lying and abusing the public so many times before; would you trust them when they're making such an outlandish claim?

So what would convince you, Joe and Jane Whitebread, that fairies exist? Direct, tangible, personal experience. But suppose you're one of only a very few that gets that. How do you think everybody else would react? Do you think your word and experience would convince even your closest family? While it's basically impossible for claims of the supernatural to get you committed on its own (you'd have to also present a clear danger such as trying to burn witches), not even the most paranoid, kidnap first, ask questions later government conspiracy would pay you any mind.

And what about those conspiracies? You know they're dumb and unsubstantiated. You know cults, pseudo-science, UF Ologists, and other hoaxes all draw from the very same reasoning as your standard masquerade. "This is reality, but the man is keeping the wool over your eyes!" It takes a special kind of insanity to unironically accept even the least far-fetched theory and so many people shouting "conspiracy!" makes it way easier to treat them all as loons. After all, they have no proof and they use the reasoning that such proof is being kept out of your hands. Their very existence goes towards maintaining the kinds of masquerade they're trying to dispel.

So what would break the masquerade? Fairies have to appear everywhere and make themselves directly accessible to every single human being that wants to confirm their existence. I don't even think Wal-Mart makes itself so accessible, so why would fairies? What would they have to gain from it? Maybe if they're trying to spread a magical virus to wipe out humanity, but then you're no longer really talking about masquerade fiction, are you?

With that in mind, I think a more convincing portrayal of the masquerade is to just never bring it up in the first place. Most people are pre-conditioned to accept only a narrow view of reality. Just take a tour of Wikipedia's cognitive bias and logical fallacy categories to find out why masquerades would maintain themselves. Instead, a secret society fighting vampires wouldn't keep it secret because of the existence of vampires, but because they're committing some very serious felonies. Aliens wouldn't keep it secret because they'll wind up being dissected alive, but because they have greater social mobility pretending to be human. No contrived tension over a human inching closer to the dark secret and the threat of throwing the whole supernatural world into the open; just think about what's in their best interest without using that cheap, unconvincing crutch.

Think this is a safe analysis of the trope or do you still think the masquerade is an impossible contrivance that should be avoided at all costs? Let's see where this line of reasoning goes.

One reason to maintain the secret nature is just the pure struggle it could cause - think X-Men vs that Senator in the second movie. And let's face it, I have some sympathy with him - we are talking people who can read your mind, kill you with a single touch, have powerful lasers for eyes, and can commit crimes with impugnity because we can't stop them.

I agree the HP premise of why the wizards keep them self separate is stupid, and was one of the reasons I didn't finish the series. Rowling has admitted a shotgun would drop Voldemort. "Evil wizards, Mr Fudge? Okay, be back here in 3 hours so you can brief the SAS."

What happens if someone catches one of your faries and finds it isn't CGI...?

The problem with your argument (well, the most glaring problem with your argument) is that it had to start at some point. Even if we allow that a masquerade should be easy to keep going, there's still the problem of beginning it.

I still stand by what I've said in previous threads: 90% of the time, The Masquerade is a trope born out of laziness, not logic.

No living human can keep a secret wholly to themselves, and we live in a society where we have increasing opportunities to blab our secrets. Our diaries are now public; our lives now easily recorded every second of the day to avoid moments being forgotten by ourselves or our enemies.

In general we think the masquerade will fail because experience has taught us so. We know of many such failures, not all of them complete, but even those that are successful at the time are ultimately partially betrayed. Things that were covered up years ago come out in part even if never in whole. The idea that it is easy to hide the fairies in the age of cameras in ubiquitous cell phones requires some kind of Hand Wave.

Your examples are all flawed because they are set in our world, which doesn't have fairies. We would deny any claimes that fairies exist because we have never been given the slightest reason to believe that fairies exist. In a world where they do exist and interact with normal people, you would have no reason to be skeptical.

Yes, the two-point counterargument would be:

1) Despite the amount of persecution in history, there has never been a real-life masquerade. This suggests that it's either impossible to start, impossible to sustain, or simply provides no substantive benefits.

2) Most people don't instinctively reject new information without making any attempt to investigate it. People are curious, and lack of curiosity is central to your theory.

So your theory relies on the assumption that, if fantasy stuff existed, people would act differently than they have ever acted before.

Even so, unless they can't appear in photographs, there'd be enough evidence to have a bunch of people convinced. Look at how many people are convinced of UF Os despite almost total lack of evidence.

In general, human nature seems more inclined towards improbable belief than improbable disbelief: We want there to be aliens because it would just be so cool, and so we tend to be less critical of the evidence and to accept it even if it's quite sparse. A masquerade requires the opposite mentality.

(In rare cases where any significant portion of the population disbelieves something provably true, usually a. they have a vested interest in it being false or were misled by someone with said vested interest, b. they've replaced the truth with something even more sensational, or most often c. both. Eg, "Global warming isn't real! It's a conspiracy!")

The problem with a lot of masquerade fiction is they have these sprawling hidden societies full of careless people and even then, they don't get exposed. That's implausible, lazy writing that expects too much of the audience. Something such as the Blade movies where they have packed nightclubs murdering about a hundred humans a night would never fly. That would be very substantial proof, impossible to cover up, and would have way more than a few renegades hunting them down. The financial records alone would give them away.

I'm thinking more from the perspective of either an extremely rare creature or a group that only recently relocated to Earth and in order for it to count as "breaking the maquerade", you need near-total public acceptance instead of small groups of true believers claiming the average person just doesn't want to see it (also known as religion/cults).

Someone that captured a fairy would still have to convince others that it's real. Even if you get somebody willing to listen to you (they're more common than you think), keep in mind science is based around reproducing results and claiming you have the only extant member of a species that violates everything we know about physics isn't likely to get much consideration from the journals. You'd have to capture a whole bunch of them and at least work out a hypothesis for how they can exist (scientists are very wary of closed loops and for good reason), going towards the widespread tangible proof.

Cell phone videos definitely makes any masquerade implausible, but again, you'd need a lot of videos from a lot of distinctive sources showing a lot of consistency to break past the hoax barrier. If it's a rare event that doesn't get caught on many prying cell phones, the default is to assume the footage that is caught is probably fake.

And while people are open to some new concepts and do want to believe in certain things, they usually have very different ideas of what they want to believe (e.g. one wants aliens, other wants angels) and getting everybody to accept one explanation would be difficult.

edited 29th Mar '12 1:34:43 PM by AlexanderPeregrine

Well, if an extremely rare creature (or very small group) just got to earth, we're not talking about a Masquerade. In that case, it's not too implausible that if they tried, they could manage to stay hidden.

But I disagree about your example with the captured fairy. You don't need multiple fairies to make the journals listen to you. Repeated results from the same fairy are still repeated results and the journals would still go crazy over the multiple incidents of the laws of physics being broken.

Discovering that fairies exist would require exactly the same burden of proof as discovering that any other new species exists, which happens all the time without a huge pushback from an incredulous populace. A single live specimen is perfectly adequate proof, since anyone who doubts you can just come look at it and verify that, yep, it's a live fairy. "How does it exist?" is an entirely separate question.

Indeed, the OP has constructed this whole concept of a "hoax barrier" that doesn't correspond to actual human behavior. A normal human reaction is to look for more information or remain unsure until the topic has been investigated thoroughly enough for the preponderance of evidence to swing one way or another.

edited 29th Mar '12 1:59:12 PM by jewelleddragon

If you've got a lot of obviously magical nonsentients running around (such as in Harry Potter) then a masquerade is indeed quite a bit harder to set up. If it's just humans doing magic, though, it's easier. Have a magical enforcement group that's stringently anti-reveal, and keep the proportion of magic-users low enough that the majority of people will never have met one, and you're fine; the occasional masquerade break will be written off unless it's repeated in an obviously connected manner, and you can prevent that by having the Magic Police come and spirit away all the evidence. Anyone who notices that and tries to publicize it will be written off as a conspiracy theorist.

But if a masquerade was successful then by definition we wouldn't know about it.

The religious persecutions of the medieval and renaissance could be thought of as masquerades, hiding priests etc.

Sporting world cups are obviously stupid and obvious. A group of people who constitute a small minority who need to avoid persecution are possible. Tom Holt and Robert Rankin pull it off.

It's not just that a new species exists, but it also 1) doesn't have any clear evolutionary origin and 2) flagrantly violates known physics. If you stumbled on something like that, you'd have to define some possible ways for them to exist within the currently accepted model of physics before the journals would go anywhere near it.

That brings up a pretty good question, though: how would a highly respected, well-funded research group (rather than a lone scientist or a class at a university) go about studying such a creature, how public would they be about it before developing some mathematical possibilities, and what happens if it truly is completely impenetrable?

This, of course, assumes the creature is kept in captivity long enough for extensive study. I'm pretty sure if scientists captured it, got the first batch of audacious results, and it got away, they'd have no choice but to keep the project under wraps until they capture another specimen.

I don't see why this would be the case. You have a magic fairy, and you can prove it because you have it. You don't have to define anything. Science won't ignore it just because it can't explain it.

This; "we're not sure how it works, so we'll pretend/assume it doesn't exist" is not how science operates. The most exciting discoveries are often "we've discovered a completely inexplicable phenomenon and have no idea what it means."

...if something actually violated everything we knew about physics, I'm pretty sure the correct response is "excitement."

Also, if the United States government announced the existence of fairy beings and changed domestic, foreign, and economic policy accordingly, I would believe it.

Well let's address the topic at hand shall I? Masquerade, a tired cliche? YOU BET YOUR ASS!

The Masquerade is done to death not just because of folks going Follow the Leader on Harry Potter, but because the inherent trope has been done a thousand times elsewhere for example Spy Fiction. (All those NGO Superpowers and nobody outside them and the spies/governments opposing them seem to realize they exist.)

Besides it's become a tad implausible to maintain any secret for any length of time anymore. Between cameras everywhere and people logging everything in writing, drawing, photo or film there's no way to maintain an integrated presence with today's society and still uphold a Masquerade fully. Somebody's gonna find it and somebody's gonna blab. (Or rather lots of somebodies.)

It's not that they would automatically reject it on principle or demand it be buried or any of that (claims of mainstream science burying the truth are usually a sign of pseudo-science). It's that it's a massive claim that would invalidate basic principles that have stood up to literally trillions of prior tests, with the added bonus of obviously coming from ancient folklore that already has extensive explanation via anthropology and psychology. It's wrong to assume that the journals would accept unquantified papers on the topic just because somebody says they have it in their lab, scout's honor, swear on their mother's grave, cross their heart and hope to die, come here and check it out; it assumes they've never had anybody fail to take due diligence in their tests or outright fabricate it. Hence, where do you go if you really do end up with something like this?

I'd agree to a point, but sometimes massive discoveries slip through the cracks as crazy talk, and can go a long time without being rediscovered. Galileo, Tesla, and that guy who pioneered impact theory as what killed the dinosaurs were written off as loons due to the social implications of their discoveries, (although in Tesla's case, Edison was being a dick) and how it would change the world as they knew it.

You walk past a guy casually browsing halfway a magazine rack in the grocery store. You go to pick something off of the shelf and browse the titles yourself. When you turn back, he's gone, despite the fact the he should still be in your field of vision even if he sprinting for cover, and you didn't hear a thing. Are you going to assume that you've met the first teleporting man, or that your eyes were playing tricks on you, and you missed a couple seconds than you thought lost in the magazines.

Ninja'd, though I always did wonder why one masquerade never stepped on another one's toes in fiction, with how many of them are going around under the radar.

edited 29th Mar '12 4:07:53 PM by moocow1452

Any masquerade that can be penetrated by the discovery and isolation of a single example, alive or dead, is going to be tricky to maintain. Sure, the scientific world is going to have trouble believing in fairies, but "Look! Here's one in a bell jar!" is rather incontrovertible. A dead one might be disbelieved or thought faked, but e.g. DNA studies would soon prove that wrong.

Stuff that doesn't leave as good evidence as a obviously new species' body would be easier to masquerade.

My issue with the Masquerade is the same one I have with the "secret histories" necessitated by conspiracy theories: They are never really secret. Also in common with conspiracy theories is the problem of concerted effort. I can accept that we might have been ignoring the weird, or assimilated it, even that it's hiding just out of reach; a group effort on the part of the weird at large to thoroughly conceal itself within the real world, however, is at least wildly unlikely, if not patently absurd.

edited 29th Mar '12 11:15:35 PM by JHM

We can examine the history of efforts at them. Take, for example, the fact that there were underwater collisions during the Cold War between US and Russian submarines. Had this become known to the public in full detail, it could well have caused World War 3, so both sides had a vested interest in covering them up.

Nevertheless, rumors of such occurrences date back to 1960. People who were in the United States Navy described specific incidents during the 1990s, without giving the specific date, but their dates of service suggest it occurred in the 1970s. They also suggested that one of the participants in the collision, probably the Russian one, was sunk; the deaths of over a hundred sailors at the hands of an enemy is sure cause for war and would be disastrous for US-Russian relations even if it came out today. People much more dedicated than I have attempted to document maintenance and repair efforts to track any such collisions and have proposed a dozen possible incidents despite the official silence of the services involved, and their vested interest in making sure nobody can prove anything ever.

The life of a masquerade attempt is apparently quite short, twenty years, even when actively pursued by the two most powerful nations on Earth. It was partially compromised more than ten years before anyone could cite a source. And I'm only discussing the one incident where firsthand knowledge even came into it; it's possible that earlier occurrences were compromised the day after they happened.

I just plain don't like the masquerade as a literary device, practicalities and justifications aside. I find it boring, as it shuts off any possibility of exploring the political, socioeconomical and military consequences of The Unmasqued World - a scenario that I always find much more interesting to play with.

edited 31st Mar '12 1:48:21 PM by pagad