House

Several people have recommended that I watch this show, which airs on Fox at 9pm EST Tuesday evenings. I hadn’t bothered until recently for two reasons, the first being that I didn’t cohabitate with a television until just recently, and the second being that I really detest television. Not the medium per se, but the fact that television shows are so universally bad; I almost never watch one without wondering later why I wasted the time.

I was repeatedly assured, however, that House was a good show, though, so I finally caved and watched it (last week and this week) with a friend of mine. I was not impressed.

The problem is that I didn’t like any of the characters at all. None of them were people I’d want to know in real life, so the various events of the plot ceased to have any significance. I usually find that I prefer a secondary character to the main one in television shows; since House revolves so much around, well, House, none of the secondary characters demonstrated enough personality in the episodes I watched to really interest me.

House himself exemplifies a philosophical error/personality trait that I utterly despise whenever I encounter it; the idea that, because you know more than other people, you also know better than they do. Hence you are justified in lying to them, manipulating them, treating them like a child, or telling them what they “ought” to do, all of which is not just foolish but evil.

The fact is that in doing any of these things you are launching a full-scale assault on the other person’s independence. Even if you are correct in your evaluation of the benefits that they would enjoy, no benefit can exist unless they know it. Why? Because in order to enjoy a benefit you have to accept it. In order to be good, something has to come to you through good means. You can’t achieve even your own good through vice, what sort of twisted rationale makes you think you can achieve someone else’s that way?

My dislike for this kind of activity, even in minor, supposedly “harmless” forms is so strong as to approach outright hatred; my own independence was hard-won and remains somewhat fragile to this day.

I’m certainly not going to turn to a demonstration of its destroyers for entertainment.