Rereading George Martin famous 4 part series more than ten years later. Some of it I do remember. It's guilty escapist pleasure like Robin Hobb but also interesting for thinking about memory.

From it:

"Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it."

But I'm not an entomologist!

Bugs are hard truths.

Minature horrors all around us, that we don't quite really register just how awful they are. I dream of an utopia, of everyone being on the same side, not against each other, not a world where even altruism is thought of in how useful it is for one group to defeat another. ("Altruistic groups defeat selfish groups...", actual quote from some sort of scientist praising altruism.) I dream of a world without bugs... Without nature... Without lions killing antelope... Without capitalism. Without nuclear families.

Remember as a child a magazine with microscope pictures of bugs. Was hard to look at. Worse is video of such a thing. And much, much worse still, at least was to me 7 years ago, was it being right there in front of you, alive, just you and the bug alone with a microscope. Too awful then. Such an awful truth. Couldn't stand to look it in the face. To stare closely into its face. Without a high powered microscope they're really too small to see their faces clearly. With it, what a fucking horror.

Or I suppose. I couldn't actually do it. Got it all set up, but couldn't look through the microscope at it.

It's not that such things are symbolic, they're more than symbolic. They are the awful truth which is all around us, that we try to not think about. The truth of nature. How cruel it is. How cruel humans are also for that matter.

To really look at humans, look at the evil they do, as if you had them under a magnifying glass/microscope, is like being an entomologist. And few people are "weird" enough to enjoy that.