{"id":95,"date":"2011-07-23T20:18:58","date_gmt":"2011-07-24T03:18:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thebigweasel.wordpress.com\/?p=95"},"modified":"2011-07-23T20:18:58","modified_gmt":"2011-07-24T03:18:58","slug":"utopian-dystopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zeppscommentaries.online\/?p=95","title":{"rendered":"Utopian Dystopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best of all possible worlds will still have mosquitoes<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a9 Bryan Zepp Jamieson
\nJuly 23rd 2011<\/p>\n

\nIf you’re like me, and you did a lot of reading as a kid and through your teenage years, then you know the situation: there’s an absolutely unforgettable story you read that left you gasping with laughter, or wonder, or made you look at the world in an entirely different way.
\nOnly one day, you think it might be fun to look that story up and re-read it, and it hits you: you can’t remember the title or the author.\u00a0 If you’re lucky, it’s a fairly well known story, and you can remember the central character’s name, or there’s some other specific item that comes to mind, and you can Google it.\u00a0 Once a friend of mine and I were discussing Mount Shasta and science fiction, and I mentioned that Heinlein once wrote a story about the locale.\u00a0 Couldn’t remember the title to save my life, but a Google search turned it up: Lost Legacy, 1943.
\nUsually you’re just plain out of luck, and it becomes one of your personal life’s mysteries, along with the name of the girl you kissed in sixth grade, or the name of the TV show with the sarcastic duck and the lumberjack.<\/p>\n


\nOne such science fiction story I remembered fondly from high school was one about a society on a different planet that, while human, was profoundly different from any human society seen on earth.\u00a0 The inhabitants of this planet had one right, and one right only.\u00a0 But it was all they needed.\u00a0 They had the right to refuse.
\nThey could refuse any request, formal or informal, civilized or not.\u00a0 The motto could have been the one for Nancy Reagan’s ill-fated anti-drug program: Just say no.\u00a0 Any citizen had the absolute right to turn around and walk away from any demand placed upon him.
\nThat was all the inhabitants needed in the way of rights.\u00a0 Earth had had a war or something and dropped out of sight for hundreds of years, and reappeared in the skies of this world in the form of a huge ship filled with bureaucrats and soldiers, there to reclaim the planet for the empire.
\nThe soldiers and bureaucrats encounter the personal sovereignty of these people, and explode.\u00a0 The story is as funny and engaging as all hell.
\nI’m luckier than some folks: I was looking at a issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction that a friend loaned me, and in the Books column by Robert K.J. Killheffer (honest….) I found a reference to it that was unmistakable.\u00a0 The story I was trying to remember\u00a0 was \u201c…And then there were none\u201d by Eric Frank Russell, written in 1951.\u00a0 It was mentioned as part of a review of a compilation of libertarian-themed stories called Give Me Liberty, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and Mark Tier, Baen, 2003.\u00a0 If I can find it, I think I’ll get a copy.\u00a0 There’s a couple of other stories I liked in there.
\nKillheffer was examining the different between right-libertarianism (Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle, usually dealing with an \u00fcber-capable entrepreneur who works miracles through sheer doggedness and perseverance, overcoming millions of drones in the process) and left-libertarianism, which shifts power and abilities to the people, who use such to counter the depredations of major social entities such as governments, churches, aristocracies and corporations.\u00a0 Russell’s work was a good example of the latter.\u00a0 It’s a recurring motif in David Brin’s work, as well.
\nScience Fiction often has strong elements of juvenile wish-fulfillment, and none more strongly so than stories dealing with utopias.\u00a0 The two branches of libertarianism merge in this type of infantilism, and it doesn’t matter if the protagonist is a Randian superman or a tractor-art hero of the Revolution.
\nOften technology lends a hand in some vital way.\u00a0 More than one SF writer has come up with something that makes individuals invulnerable and\/or self-sufficient enough that they can safely turn their back on authority.
\nA few months ago, I started playing with a storyline in which a deus ex machina pops into everyone’s lives and gives them the ability to be completely self-sufficient.\u00a0 The device in question are boxes roughly the size of a phone booth and colored gun-metal blue just so I could have a handy excuse to have my characters and narrator refer to them as \u201ctardises\u201d.\u00a0 Just like the Doctor’s conveyance\/spouse, only combined with the devices for sustenance found in \u201cTo Your Scattered Bodies Go\u201d by Phillip Jos\u00e9 Farmer.\u00a0\u00a0 These tardises could travel about (although not in time), were bigger inside than out, and through carefully-unexplained technology, make the person in the tardis completely invulnerable to any external environment, and capable of satisfying all basic needs indefinitely\u2014oxygen, food, water, medical care, and even entertainment.\u00a0 The tardises had some limitations: they couldn’t travel faster than light, and not only could you not mount weapons on the outside, but weapons that depended on anything more than human muscle to work couldn’t work on the inside.\u00a0 This restriction on weapons is the closest thing to a moral suggestion that the silent and invisible gods who created the tardises make.
\nOne day, they magically appear, one to each person.\u00a0 The tardis.\u00a0 Because one inaccurate and pilfered noun is better than a thousand fumbling adjectives.
\nAnyone who has one (and that’s everyone) can live where they want\u2014on top of Everest, at the bottom of the sea, on the Moon, anywhere.\u00a0 They can go wherever they like, subject only to Einstein’s laws.\u00a0 (There are no wormholes or warp drives in this universe).
\nUtopia, right?
\nWouldn’t be much of a story without a few bumps, so I introduced them.
\nFor starters, I make the assumption that humanity is not going to eagerly embrace this incredible boon.\u00a0 At first, a lot of people will refuse to enter the devices, even as their properties become known, because they are new, different, and unexplained, and people are naturally mistrustful.\u00a0 In time, suspicions will succumb to increasing familiarity, but I posit that by the time that occurs, roughly a third of humanity will still refuse to have anything to do with the tardises.
\nReasons are all over the map, of course.\u00a0 Some people have religious objections.\u00a0 Some never get over the fear.\u00a0 Others feel that humanity’s place is working with the earth, rather than just treating it as a backdrop for their otherwise uninvolved lives.
\nBut the Tardis are embraced by billions who suddenly have no need for governments or economies, and governments fall and economies crash, leaving the tardis dwellers to set up their own perforce loose system of regulation, and an economy that is entirely based on those luxury or entertainment items that the tardises cannot supply.\u00a0 (L’il Abner readers will remember the Schmoos, affable and self-sacrificing creature that gave humanity everything they needed.\u00a0 Naturally, they had to be destroyed because they were bad for business.)
\nUtopia?\u00a0 Not on my watch!
\nAt time goes by, the people living in the tardises who haven’t abandoned earth entirely have come to value the aesthetic value of the view they get through the door of their tardises.\u00a0 Thus they aren’t amused to see people living in squalor and hunger (Tacky! Tacky!) and polluting and despoiling the scenery.
\nThe tardis dwellers want an idyllic world that looks like a giant park, and where all signs of human habitation are subtle, and rabbits and deer gambol amongst the mounds that form the ultra-modern homes.\u00a0 The sort-of world-wide Hobbit village where the author elides over the fact that for the population to be so thinly spread, several billion people had to go missing.
\nThis splitting of humanity leads, eventually, to war.\u00a0 It isn’t as one-sided as you might guess, since the only way the tardis dwellers can take the offensive is by coming out of the boxes and fighting, which makes them vulnerable, and the people living on the land aren’t exactly ignorant farmers.\u00a0 They can fight back, and do.
\nThe narrator, sickened by the things he has to do in his attacks on the land dwellers, eventually rebells and runs off in his tardis, and drops himself into his own particular version of hell in the process, but I’m not going to discuss that since it’s the meat of the story.
\nA lot of what passes for \u201clibertarianism\u201d in the United States today is just fascism wearing a more populist coat of paint.\u00a0 But even before it was poisoned and usurped by the far right, it was already an unworkable example of utopian thinking.\u00a0 Hyper capable capitalists have not come to save the day\u2014in the 60 odd years since Heinlein wrote \u201cThe Man Who Sold the Moon\u201d, no private sector spacecraft has achieved orbit, let alone colonized the moon.\u00a0 And if you think any society can uphold the absolute right of refusal, look at how Americans have meekly succumbed to the yoke of authoritarianism, especially since 9\/11.
\nI believe humans cannot be perfected.\u00a0 For one thing, we have absolutely no idea of what \u201cperfection\u201d is,\u00a0 and a a result, hold literally billions of different opinions on what it might be.\u00a0 Does it involve a god?\u00a0 Is it limited to certain people?
\nWe can’t be perfect or perfected, but we can be better.\u00a0 And that, I think is why writers write about utopias.\u00a0 Even my own dystopian view of utopia has a net improvement for humanity, even if humanity is of divided opinions on how best to use this improvement.
\nWe might never reach the stars.\u00a0 But that doesn’t mean we should stop looking up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best of all possible worlds will still have mosquitoes \u00a9 Bryan Zepp Jamieson July 23rd 2011 If you’re like me, and you did a lot of reading as a kid and through your teenage years, then you know the situation: there’s an absolutely unforgettable story you read that left you gasping with laughter, or … <\/p>\n

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