Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The short story
Contd. from
By the end of World War II, one of the great Dictatorships was defeated – the same land area as saw the worst defeat in the first war. The Dictatorship which covered so much of the central landmass had been weakened, almost to the point of defeat, but survived, and made a slow, staggering recovery. Another vast area of the central landmass, to the east of this Dictatorship, ended half a century of local wars, civil wars, suffering, and over a century of exploitation and invasion by the Northwest fringes by turning to Dictatorship. The Isolated Northern Continent had been strengthened by the war and was now the major world power. The Northwest fringes on the whole had been severely weakened. They had to let go their grip of their colonies. Impoverished, brutalized – while being, formally, victors – they were no longer world powers. Retreating from these colonies they left behind technology, an idea of society based entirely on physical well¬being, physical satisfaction, material accumulation – to cultures who, before encounter with these all-ravaging Northwest fringers, had been infinitely more closely attuned with Canopus than the £ringers had ever been.
This period can be-is by some of our scholars-designated The Age of Ideology. [For this viewpoint SEE VOL. 3011, SUMMARY CHAPTER.]
The political groupings were all entrenched in bitterly defended ideologies.
The local religions continued, infinitely divided and subdivided, each entrenched in their ideologies.
Science was the most recent ideology. War had immeasurably strengthened it. Its ways of thought, in its beginnings flexible and open, had hardened, as everything must on Shikasta, and scientists, as a whole – we exclude individuals in this area as in all others – were as impervious to real experience as the religionists had ever been. Science, its basic sets of mind, its prejudices, gripped the whole globe and there was no appeal. Just as individuals of our tendencies of mind, our inclinations towards the truth, our "citizens" had had to live under the power and the threat of religions who would use any brutalities to defend their dogmas, so now individuals with differing inclinations and needs from those tolerated by science had to lead silent or prudent lives, careful of offending the bigotries of the scientific global gov¬erning class: in the service of national governments and therefore of war – an invisible global ruling caste, obedient to the warmakers. The industries that made weapons, the armies, the scientists who served them – these could not be easily attacked, since the formal picture of how the globe was run did not include this, the real picture. Never has there been such a totalitarian, all-pervasive, all-powerful governing caste anywhere: and yet the citizens of Shikasta were hardly aware of it, as they mouthed slogans and waited for their deaths by holocaust. They remained unaware of what "their" governments were doing, right up to the end. Each national grouping developed in¬dustries, weapons, horrors of all kinds that the people knew nothing about. If glimpses were caught of these weapons, then government would deny they existed. [SEE History of Shikasta, VOLS. 3013, 3014, and CHAPTER 9 this volume, Use of Moon as Military Base.] There were space probes, space weapons, explorations of planets, use of planets, rivalries over their moon, about which the populations were not told.
And here is the place to say that the mass of the populations, the average individual, were, was, infinitely better, more sane, than those who ruled them: most would have been appalled at what was being done by "their" representatives. It is safe to say that if even a part of what was being kept from them had came to their notice, there would have been mass risings across the globe, massacres of the rulers, riots ... unfortunately, when peoples are helpless, betrayed, lied to, they possess no weapons but the (useless) ones of rioting, looting, mass murder, invective.
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The short story
Contd.
During the years following the end of World War II, there were many "small" wars, some as vicious and extensive as wars in the recent past described as major. The needs of the armament industries, as much as ideology, dictated the form and intensities of these wars. During this period savage exterminations of previously autonomous "primitive" peoples took place, mostly in the Isolated Southern Continent (otherwise known as Southern Continent II). During this period colonial risings were used by all the major powers for their own purposes. During this period psychological methods of warfare and control of civilian populations developed to an extent previously undreamed of.
Here we must attempt to underline another point which it is almost impossible for those with our set of mind to appreciate.
When a war was over, or a phase of war, with its submersion in the barbarous, the savage, the degrading, Shikastans were nearly all able to perform some sort of mental realignment that caused them to "forget." This did not mean that wars were not idols, subjects for pious mental exercises of all sorts. Heroisms and escapes and braveries of local and limited kinds were raised into national preoccupations, which were in fact forms of religion. But this not only did not assist, but prevented, an understanding of how the fabric of cultures had been attacked and destroyed. After each war, a renewed descent into barbarism was sharply visible – but apparently cause and effect were not connected, in the minds of Shikastans.
After World War II, in the Northwest fringes and in the Isolated Northern Continent, corruption, the low level of public life, was obvious. The two "minor" wars conducted by the Isolated Northern Continent reduced its governmental agencies, even those visible and presented to the public inspection, to public scandal. Leaders of the nation were murdered. Bribery, looting, theft, from the top of the pyramids of power to the bottom, were the norm. People were taught to live for their own advancement and the acquisition of goods. Consumption of food, drink, every possible commodity was built into the economic structure of every society. [VOL. 3009, Economies of Affluence.] And yet these repulsive symptoms of decay were not seen as direct consequences of the wars that ruled their lives.
During the whole of the Century of Destruction, there were sudden reversals: treaties between nations which had been at war, so that these turned their hostilities on nations only recently allies; secret treaties between nations actually at war; enemies and allies constantly changing positions, proving that the governing factor was in the need for war, as such. During this period every major city in the northern hemisphere lived inside a ring of terror: each had anything up to thirty weapons aimed at it, everyone of which could reduce it and its inhabitants to ash in seconds-pointed from artificial satellites in the skies, directed from underwater ships that ceaselessly patrolled the seas, directed from land bases perhaps halfway across the globe. These were controlled by machines which everyone knew were not infallible – and everybody knew that more than once the destruction of cities and areas had been avoided by a "miracle." But the populations were never told how often these "miracles" had taken place – near-lethal accidents between machines in the skies, collisions between machines under the oceans, weapons only just not unleashed from the power bases. Looking from outside at this planet it was as if at a totally crazed species.
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The short story
Contd.
In large parts of the northern hemisphere was a standard of living that had recently belonged only to emperors and their courts. Particularly in the Isolated Northern Continent, the wealth was a scandal, even to many of their own citizens. Poor people lived there as the rich have done in previous epochs. The continent was heaped with waste, with wreckage, with the spoils of the rest of the world. Around every city, town, even a minor settlement in a desert, rose middens full of discarded goods and food that in other less favoured parts of the globe would mean the difference between life and death to millions. Visitors to this continent marvelled - but at what people could be taught to believe was their due, and their right.
This dominant culture set the tone and standard for most of Shikasta. For regardless of the ideological label attaching to each Rational area, they all had in common that technology was the key to all good, and that good was always material gain, comfort, pleasure. The real purposes of life – so long ago perverted – kept alive with such difficulty by us, maintained at such a cost – had been forgotten, were ridiculed by those who had ever heard of them, for distorted inklings of the truth remained in the religions. And all this time the earth was being despoiled. The minerals were being ripped out, the fuels wasted, the soils depleted by an improvident and short-sighted agriculture, the animals and plants slaughtered and destroyed, the seas being filled with filth and poison, the atmosphere was corrupted and always, all the time, the propaganda machines thumped out: more, more, more, drink more, eat more, consume more, discard more-in a frenzy, a mania. These were maddened creatures, and the small voices that rose in protest were not enough to halt the processes that had been set in motion and were sustained by greed. By the lack of substance-of-we-feeling.
But the extreme riches of the northern hemisphere were not distributed evenly among their own populations, and the less favoured classes were increasingly in rebellion. The Isolated Northern Continent and the Northwest fringe areas also included large numbers of dark-skinned people brought in originally as cheap labour to do jobs disdained by the whites – and while these did gain, to an extent, some of the general affluence, it could be said that looking at Shikasta as a whole, it was the white-skinned that did well, the dark-skinned poorly.
And this wassaid, of course, more and more loudly by the dark-skinned, who hated the white-skinned exploiters as perhaps conquerors have never before been hated.
Inside each national area everywhere, north and south, east and west, discontent grew. This was not only because of the gap between the well off and the poor, but because their way of life, where augmenting consumption was the only criterion, increasingly saddened and depressed their real selves, their hidden selves, which were unfed, were ignored, were starved, were lied to, by almost every agency around them, by every authority they had been taught to, but could not, respect.
Increasingly the two main southern continents were tom by wars and disorders of every kind--sometimes civil wars between blacks, sometimes between blacks and remnants of the old white oppression, and between rival sects and juntas and power groups. Local dictators abounded. Vast territories were denuded of forests, species of animals destroyed, tribes murdered or dispersed ....
War. Civil War. Murder. Torture. Exploitation. Oppression and suppression. And always lies, lies, lies. Always in the name of progress, and equality and development and democracy.
The main ideology all over Shikasta was now variations on this theme of economic development, justice, equality, democracy.
Not for the first time in the miserable story of this terrible century, this particular ideology – economic justice, equality, democracy, and the rest – took power at a time when the economy of an area was at its most disrupted: the Northwest fringes became dominated by governments "of the left," which presided over a descent into chaos and misery.
The formerly exploited areas of the world delighted in this fall of their former persecutors, their tormentors – the race that had enslaved them, enserfed them, stolen from them, above all, despised them because of their skin colour and destroyed their indigenous cultures now at last beginning to be understood and valued . . . but too late, for they had been destroyed by the white race and its technologies.
There was no one to rescue the Northwest fringes, in the grip of grindingly repetitive, dogmatic Dictatorships, all unable to solve the problems they had inherited – the worst and chief one being that the empires that had brought wealth had not only collapsed, leaving them in a vacuum, but had left behind false and unreal ideas of what they were, their importance in the global scale. Revenge played its part, not an inconsiderable part, in what was happening.
Chaos ruled. Chaos economic, mental, spiritual – I use this word in its exact, Canopean sense – ruled while the propaganda roared and blared from loudspeaker, radio, television.
The time of the epidemics and diseases, the time of famine and mass deaths had come.
On the main landmass two great Powers were in mortal combat.
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The short story
The Dictatorship that had come into being at the end of World War I, in the centre, and the Dictatorship that had taken hold of the eastern areas now drew into their conflict most of Shikasta, directly or indirectly. The younger Dictatorship was stronger. The older one was already in decline, its empire fraying away, its populations more and more in revolt or sullen, its ruling class increasingly remote from its people – processes of growth and decay that had in the past taken a couple of centuries now were accomplished in a few decades. This Dictatorship was not able to withstand the advance of the eastern Dictatorship whose populations were bursting its boundaries. These masses overran a good part of the older Dictatorship, and then overran, too, the Northwest fringes, in the name of a superior ideology though in fact this was but a version of the predominating ideology of the Northwest fringes. The new masters were clever, adroit, intelligent; they foresaw for themselves the dominance of all the main landmass of Shikasta, and the continuance of that dominance.
But meanwhile the armaments piled up, up, up ....
The war began in error. A mechanism went wrong, and major cities were blasted into death-giving dusts. That something of this kind was bound to happen had been plentifully forecast by technicians of all countries ... but the Shammat influences were too strong.
In a short time, nearly the whole of the northern hemisphere was in ruins. Very different, these, from the ruins of the second war, cities which were rapidly rebuilt. No, these ruins were uninhabitable, the earth around them poisoned.
Weapons that had been kept secret now filled the skies, and the dying survivors, staggering and weeping and vomitting in their ruins, lifted their eyes to watch titanic battles being fought, and with their last breaths muttered of "Gods" and "Devils" and "Angels" and "Hell."
Underground were shelters, sealed against radiation, poisons, chemical influences, deadly sound impulses, death rays. They had been built for the ruling classes. In these a few did survive.
In remote areas, islands, places sheltered by chance, a few people survived.
The populations of all the southern continents and islands were also affected by pestilence, by radiations, by soil and water and contamination, and were much reduced.
Within a couple of decades, of the billions upon billions of Shikasta perhaps 1 percent remained. The substance-of-we-feeling, previously shared among these multitudes, was now enough to sustain, and keep them all sweet, and whole, and healthy.
The inhabitants of Shikasta, restored to themselves, looked about, could not believe what they saw – and wondered whythey had been mad.
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The short story
Another disguised message since the first one didn't work.
My Lady Fatima and the Animals.
There once was a small girl who grew up with her
parents, all alone in a forest. One day she found that
her father and mother were dead and she would have to
fend for herself. Her parents had left behind a Mihrab,
a strange carved ornament like a window-frame, which they
kept hung on a wall of their hut.
`Since I am now alone,' said Fatima, `and shall
have to survive in this forest where the living things
are only animals, it would be best if I could talk to
them and understand their speech.'
So she spent a good part of her day addressing
this aspiration to the frame on the wall: `Mihrab, give
me the power to understand animals and to speak with
them.'
After a long time she suddenly had the impression
that she would be able to communicate with birds,
animals, even fish. So she went into the woods to try.
Soon she came to a pool. On the top of the pool
was a pond-fly, which skipped about on the surface and
never entered the water. Swimming in the water were
several fish, and stuck to the bottom of the pond were
some snails.
Fatima said, in order to start a conversation:
`Fly, why do you not enter the water?'
`Why should I, supposing that that were possible,
which it is not?'
`Because you would be safe from the birds, which
swoop down and eat you.'
`I haven't been eaten yet, have I?' said the fly.
And that was the end of the conversation.
Then Fatima spoke to the fish. `Fish,' she said
to it through the water, `why do you not find out how to
get out of the water, little by little? I have heard
that some fish can do this.'
`Absolutely impossible,' said the fish; `nobody
has done that and survived. We are brought up to believe
that it is both a sin and a mortal danger.' And he
turned his back and dived into the shadows, unwilling to
hear such nonsense.
So she called down to the snail: `Snail, you
could crawl out of the water and find nice herbs to eat.
I have heard that snails can really do that.'
`A question is best answered by a question when a
wise snail hears it,' said the snail. `Perhaps you would
be kind enough to tell me exactly why you have so much
interest in MY welfare? People should look after
themselves.'
`Well,' said Fatima, `I suppose it is because
when a person can see more about another person, he wants
to help him to attain greater heights.'
`That seems a strange idea to me,' said the
snail, and crawled out of earshot under a rock.
Fatima gave up on the fly, the fish and the
snail, and wandered on into the forest, looking for
something else to talk to. She felt that she must be
able to be of use to someone. After all, she had much
more knowledge than these forest-folks. A bird, she
thought, for example, could be warned to store food for
the winter, or to nest near the warmth of a hut, so that
it would not die unnecessarily. But she did not see a
bird.
Instead, she came across the hut of a
charcoal-burner. He was an old man, and he sat in front
of his door, burning charcoal to take to the market.
Fatima, delighted at seeing another human being,
the only one other than her parents whom she had met, ran
up to him. She told him her experiences that day.
`Do not worry about that, child,' said the kindly
old man; `there are things which a human being has to
learn, and those things are of vital importance to his
future.'
`Things to learn?' said Fatima, `And what should
I want with things to learn, pray? They would only, most
probably, change my way of life and thinking.' And, like
the fly, the fish and the snail, she moved away out of
contact with the charcoal-burner.
Fatima, daughter of Walia, spent another thirty
years like the fly, the fish and the snail before she
learned anything at all.
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The short story
And it has that optimistic ring that your tihinking can evolve even if you take as long as 30 years. For others there is always the perspective of "a few million years of deliberation yet to go or until we become extinct, whichever is the sooner" as Derek put it in another context. That's also optimistic in a way though.
An adjunct to the beautiful teaching story that Jacek posted
The Commanding Self
by Idries Shah
Loading and Unloading
When someone learns from someone else, and starts to teach what he has learned, a situation exists which we should look at very carefully, because most people do not understand what is happening.
Forget for a moment that it is 'teaching' that we are talking about. The human being, at a far more basic level, 'gets' something from someone else. This thing may be a blow, information, money, the idea that he has had an experience.
As soon as this thing is 'got' or believed to be 'got', the next, automatic move of the human being is to try to pass it on. This is because the human is a communicator, or operates as such.
It is only at a later stage (even if this stage comes after only two seconds), that the individual decides that he has 'got' knowledge which he must communicate BECAUSE IT IS KNOWLEDGE.Because he is unaware of this characteristic, he will imagine that it is the fact that it is knowledge which prompted him to want to communicate it.
A certain, brief, verification of this is to be found in watching small children. They try to communicate. They try to get and to give to others, any sort of object.And they seek a response.
Because of the socially-determined ethic, of course, this getting and giving often reaps the richest rewards. A person getting a lot of money and giving most of it away will earn plaudits and honours.
Another important part of the getting-giving process is when ideas are offered to people. You often find that people who have ideas to communicate (whether these are of any value or not) will spurn or refuse to entertain other ideas. This is often because they are already 'getting' their ideas from somewhere, or have got them, and their giving-out process is at work.
We are all familiar with the situation of people wanting to hold forth on some subject and refusing to listen to anything else. This is exactly what happens when a person is interrupted during his 'unloading' phase. This helps to understand why people are sometimes bigoted. They are to all appearances intractable, but in fact what they are saying is: " I am operating my unloading phase, do not interrupt it." This comes out as 'Smith's ideas are of no importance'; or that is irrelevant to out theme' and so on.
Ignorance of the existence and operation of this phenomenon causes people almost to live in a dream: because they are wondering why Smith's ideas are of no importance, or why this or that is irrelevant. They should instead realise that they should not be interrupting an unloading process.
-------
[Edited by Nanna Mercer on November 1, 2009 9:19 AM]
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: The short story
Originally written by John Bunch on November 10, 2009 1:50 AM in Post #189078
The Europeans love negotiation. ... Negotiation is far less expensive than actually going out and doing things, physically. Better to have a conference in Geneva on non-violence, than actually have to send real soldiers to a real battlefield, ...
As we celebrate Veterans Day (US), Remembrance Day (Canada), Armistice Day in many allied countries and Independence Day (Poland) today, proudly remembering old wars and busily planning new ones, I decided to resume 'unloading' from the same Doris Lessing's volume and thus heed one of John's interplanetary lessons:
Originally written by John Bunch on November 8, 2009 7:08 PM in Post #188935
... I used to have a college history professor who used to tell us to imagine what a man from Mars would think of things here. It seems hopelessly quaint to do so in our "postmodern" age (and our age of political correctness) in which the more convoluted the theory, the more it is viewed to be true. But I still think it is valid. And I think a man from Mars would probably think that Israel is mostly in the right and is getting a very unfair hearing.
Doris Lessing adopts precisely such an interplanetary perspective, except that she doesn't focus on Israel, as you may remember from my intro above:
Originally written by Jacek K. on October 20, 2009 11:20 PM
Rather than a short story it's part of the first volume of Doris Lessing's the Canopus in Argos: Archives space fiction series, i.e. Shikasta (1979).
Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, is a Iranian-born British writer who grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). IMO she is highly qualified to take a look at the history of the Earth from the distance of thousands of years into the future.
History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III. Armies: Various Types of: The Armies of the Young.
"Coming events cast their shadows before." This Shikastan observation was of particular appropriateness during an epoch when the tempo of events was so speeded up. Small harbingers of major social phenomena could be noted, not one or two centuries, but a few years before, sometimes even months. Never was there a time on Shikasta when it was easier to see what was coming; never a time when it could have been so easy for them to understand the simple truth that they were not in control of what was happening to them.
Already in the eighth decade every government on Shikasta was preoccupied, often fearfully and secretively, with the consequences of mass unemployment, and particularly among the young. By then it was evident that the new (and often unforeseen) technologies would make mass unemployment inevitable everywhere, even without the world economic crisis which was due mostly to the spending of the wealth and resources of the planet primarily on wars and the preparations for wars: inevitable even if the population was not increasing at such a rate. (The checks on this increase by deaths due to famines, epidemics, and natural disasters-these last enormously increased due to the cosmic pressures--did not impose a significant effect until later.)
By that time knowledge of mass psychology, crowd control, the psychology of armies, was sophisticated within the limits Shikasta had imposed on itself. [SEE SUBSECTION 3, "The Shifting Criteria and Standards in the Scientifically 'Respectable' and Permitted. Scientific Bigotry Analysed and Compared with Political, and Religious Bigotry in Several Cultures." VOL. 3010, CHAPTER 9, "Results of Secret Research in Military Scientific Establishments and Their Impacts on Civilian and Revealed Science."]
All governments had a pretty clear idea of the dilemmas they faced; and most engaged, to one degree or another, in intensive and permanent discussions with experts on the control of populations.
By the end of the decade no one could be in ignorance as to what must be expected from large numbers of permanently unemployed youth. Already the cities were helpless before the aimless, random, unorganised violence characteristic of small groups of the young, male and female, who "for no reason" destroyed anything they could. The amenities on which the cities of Shikasta were dependent for even an approximation to comfortable living--telephones, transport, parks, public buildings, anything in fact that came into the public domain--might at any moment be destroyed, defaced, or made temporarily inoperative. The cities were no longer safe at night, for these groups of young robbed, assaulted, murdered, always on impulse--and without ill-feeling, almost as a game.
The remedy, an increase in policing--a general increase in militarisation, in fact--was already highlighting the nature of the problem. What is begun has a momentum: the consequences of greater police surveillance, sharper penalties, and the further cramming of prisons already overfull, must be even greater police surveillance and powers, sharper penalties, and a criminal population becoming steadily more brutalised. But these were the beginnings of the problem: its infancy. Rampaging crowds of--at that stage--mostly male youth, on special occasions, such as public games and spectacles; the occasional, sporadic, apparently motiveless violence of small groups--these symptoms were the faint shadow of things to come, a harbinger, even though the public life of cities was already transformed, and the older people mourned lost civil standards and amenities, for it must be remembered that while we may look back at, and can study, a century of deepening
barbarism, of increasing horror, a family wanting no more than to live without challenge or drama could easily find a quiet street, and "peace," provided they were fortunate enough to live in a comparatively sheltered and favoured geographical area, and provided they were able to make the mental adjustment to relegate war--and its consequences--into something that happened elsewhere and did not affect them; or something that had happened to them, but between such and such dates, and then taken itself off.
In innumerable cities during this epoch of almost permanent war, when the wealth of Shikasta was poured into war, when every information channel poured out news of war and war preparations, it was possible, for short periods, to live, by means of making constant mental adjustments, in a state of quite comfortable illusion.
But this was not possible for the governments, which had to face the problem of multitudes of people, nearly all young, who had no prospect of any kind of work, who had never worked, and whose education fitted them only for idleness.
At some point their numbers had to increase to the point where much more than occasional and haphazard violence, casual vandalisation, could be expected. Crowds, masses, would, as if at a signal, but seeming to themselves "by chance,” pour through cities, smashing everything they could find, killing--casually and without reason--those they found in the streets, and when the orgy of destruction was over, return sullen and bewildered to their homes. Hordes, or small armies, or bands, or even smallish groups, would rage through countrysides, killing animals, overturning machinery, burning crops, working havoc.
It was clear what had to be done. And it was done. Numbers of these potential arsonists and destroyers were taken into various military organisations that had civilian designations; what was done, in fact, was what always was done in times of such disturbances on Shikasta: the thief was set to catch the thief, the despoilers were controlled by the despoilers, put into uniform and made into public servants.
But there would be more, and more, and more ... there were more and more: millions. And millions.
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