"...your standards, your whole raison d'etre are no longer admissible in civilzation as it has developed. Such a concentration of power in so few hands, devoid of every social control, is no more tolerable than a pathogen in the bloodstream." (p. 393)
I agree although I do not find the pathogen analogy apt. Society is an interaction between conscious beings, not an unconscious organic process. Anderson showed us how large corporations can abuse power in Mirkheim.
Guthrie wants freedom. As Alex Panshin asked in a book on Heinlein, freedom for whom to do what? In a high energy, high tech, non-market economy where it is no longer necessary to be employed either by self or other in order to survive in comfort, I would regard every individual as free if they had unimpeded choice of life style and unlimited access to travel, learning, social activity and participation in democratic decision-making processes about social policies.
Must freedom include the ability of some to control or direct the work activities of others, the more others the better? It has come to mean this because, in a market economy, "free enterprise" is valued. I think we must see this as one necessary stage of historical development. How else could we have transcended feudalism and autocracy, as Anderson brilliantly shows in The Shield Of Time? But I do not think that human diversity and dynamism will be negated by using technology to maximise freedom for each and all.
Guthrie wants to live at a frontier of exploration, innovation and speculation. (This last word has both intellectual and economic meanings and I here exploit that ambiguity.) I think that there would be unlimited scope for all these activities if standards of living and culture were raised with the social deployment of technology. (See HG Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come.) In American sf, and particularly in Anderson's works, the frontier of exploration has been identified with travelling as far as possible in space and this also enables freedom-loving characters to put the maximum distance between themselves and what they see as an unacceptable regime on Earth, whether openly dictatorial or unacceptably controlled and safe.
I think the reality is that there is plenty of room on Earth and in the Solar System for exploration and innovation. I do agree about the necessity of getting some self-sustaining communities off Earth. I do not agree with the President of the World Federation that "Untrammeled liberty..." is a "...magnificent fossil..." (p. 395). Here she is accepting Guthrie's terminology. Surely she does, or certainly should, want liberty for humanity? Guthrie has just said that he will be sorry to see Fireball, "Not the business. The idea..." end but the idea of liberty certainly should not end. I seem to be somewhere between the two disputants.
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