Survival And Sanity

The two most vital issues are:

survival and sanity;
how we eat and how we think;
body and mind;
economics and psychology;
"daily bread" and "not by bread alone."

Survival is a prerequisite of sanity but technological advance makes sanity necessary for survival.

Governments either control or facilitate economic production. In Poul Anderson's "Un-Man," the UN world government not only feeds a growing global population by means of new agricultural areas and sea stations but also addresses problems in its citizens' psychologies:

"So thin a knife edge, so deep an abyss of chaos and ruin - Society was mad, humanity was a race of insane, and the few who strove to build stability were working against shattering odds."
-Poul Anderson, "Un-Man" IN Anderson, The Psychotechnic League (New York, 1981), pp. 31-129 AT p. 52.

"The rising incidence of neurosis and insanity among the intelligent and apathy among the insensitive had to be checked before other Years of Madness came." (op. cit., pp. 94-95)

"Could enemies within and without be held in check long enough for the forces of progress to advance?"
-Sandra Miesel, interstitial passage, op. cit., p. 130.

Who are "enemies within"? In the past, when Communist Russia was regarded as an enemy without, then a Communist Party in the US or Britain was regarded as an enemy within. Margaret Thatcher called striking British miners the "enemy within." However, in "Un-Man," there is a world government so all its enemies are "within." In Miesel's phrase, I think that enemies without are, e.g., nationalists and militarists who want to overthrow the world government whereas the main enemy within is as described in a passage that I have quoted more than once before:

"The enemy was old and strong and crafty, it took a million forms and could never quite be slain. For it was man himself - the madness and sorrow of the human soul, the revolt of a primitive against the unnatural state called civilization and freedom." (op. cit., pp. 125-126)

In fact, Miesel continues:

"Since the flaws in human society were the products of flaws in each of its members, fundamental improvement had to begin with the individual. Synthesis training devised by Michael Tighe of the Psychotechnic Institute seemed a promising means of producing fully-developed persons who could shape history." (p. 130)

There will now be a short intermission while the blogger satisfies the inner man by eating and blog readers perhaps contemplate the benefits to society of "Synthesis training."