See:
History And Life
Concluding Details, Josserek And Van Rijn
In "Esau," he suggests that:
"'...ninety-nine point nine nine per cent of every sophont race is wearing diapers, at least on their brains, and it leaks out of their mouths.'" (p. 551)
Disagreeable. Unpleasant.
Over the page, he is more of the van Rijn that we like. He tells Dalmady that he will be promoted to:
"'Entrepreneur! You will keep the title of factor, because we can't make jealousies, but what you do is what the old Americans would have called a horse of a different dollar.'" (p. 552)
Van Rijn knows how to manage people. Although he was created by an American, he lives in a period when nation-states and dollars no longer exist. We feel nostalgia towards the old Americans and their dollars.
12 comments:
Paul:
He would regard me with contempt. Good-natured contempt, I expect, unless my failings seriously got in his way, but he definitely wouldn't want to sign me on for anything except the most "routineer" work.
That's why I retired from the Army when I did. I'd risen to high enough rank that I couldn't any longer be just a subordinate, and I realized I didn't have what it took to really be a leader. It was and is a quite depressing realization.
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way." I couldn't do the first two, so I got out of the way. And I'd be useless to van Rijn or someone like him, other than as a meticulous scribe-type.
As for how I regard him.... Like certain animals, I feel, Nick van Rijn is best admired with a barrier between us so he can't actually affect my life. In the pages of books, he can be entertaining. In person, I'd want to kill him.
David,
I would enjoy being his dinner guest with him paying the (large) bill.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul and DAVID!
Paul: I think you are persistently missing the point of why Nicholas van Rijn felt such anger at the end of "The Master Key." His contempt and anger was caused because of how MANY people are willing to let others think for them and refuse to think and act independently of what busy bodies tell them to do. For being too willing to let tyrants take away their freedom as long as they were taken care of. And I don't think that's an illegitimate POV for Old Nick to have.
And maybe you can meet Nicholas van Rijn at the Old Phoenix Inn! (Smiles)
David: I'm a bit surprised by your comments. Even if a good soldier can't always be a LEADER, couldn't he be a good "follower" in the sense of being an efficient executor of the plans of a decisive leader?
Emil Dalmady was being promoted from command of the SS & L's trading post on Suleiman because he was OVERQUALIFIED for that job. But if you were a good "routineer" more than qualified to keep it running, Old Nick would not have despised you because he said more than once that good, competent administrators were valuable and necessary.
And Old Nick respected people who had the gumption to argue with him, or even to make the mistake of trying to FIGHT him. All that fat he carried did not prevent him from being immensely strong and fast, when necessary.
Sean
Sean
There's a quote I'm unable to track down, which I THOUGHT was from Moliere, but maybe not:
"We should see people as they are, not as they want them to be.
It seems PA imagines an ideal system where we have a few well-meaning, self-regulating "natural leaders" who take good care of their timid followers who seek security more than liberty., with liberty being the right of "natural leaders' to do what they want with impunity- most things which restrain "natural leaders" from "going the distance" is an infringement of liberty and to be avoided. This free and open competition will lead to the best scenario available for the greatest number, until it starts to come down due to the inherent fallibility of humans...
Sean, what do you mean by "freedom"?
Besides "government", who are the "busybodies"?
ON may have respected people who argued with him, but he didn't seem to have much patience in being told "NO!" by others.
There's a term for people who completely follow their own paths; who are free from the constraints of those around them: the busybodies, tyrants, and other such- they do as they please.
The term is "sociopath"....
Cheers,
-kh
Additional thing: "Dalmady" is a Magyar name. Emil Dalmady is from Altai and the the Altaians were Mongols. Please advise...
-kh
I cannot advise...
Kaor, Keith!
It's later, so I will respond briefly. Altai was settled not only by Mongols but also by RUSSIANS. Take note of the Slavic names some of the people there have. So, if Russians and Mongols colonized Altai, why not a few Magyars?
Sean
Kaor, Keith!
I have time now to respond more fully. I'm a bit surprised by your comments. It is plain, in my opinion, from Anderson's works that he distrusted heavily centralized gov'ts of any kind. His basic political view was libertarianism with a leavening of conservative caution and realism. But he was not dogmatic merely about FORMS of goverment. Any state that accepted limits on its powers, respected the rights of its people, and did not govern too badly was acceptable to him. See my article "Political Legitimacy In The Thought of Poul Anderson."
I'll be blunt, the busybodies these days are mostly on the left. the kind of meddlers who want to interfere with and control's people's lives. The kind of people who want the government to take over more and more activities better left to lower levels of government or private hands. Iow, concentrating more and more power in the state. That has been the general, and disastrous trend in the US since at least the election of 1912. We are seeing a lot of demands right now for exactly that in the Democratic party, where many now openly advocate nonsense like socialism.
Sean
Kaor, Keith!
With all due respect, Anderson favored liberty, but for ordinary people as well as great leaders. This is made clear in various places in his work. To take one example, I remember ROGUE SWORD, where the oppression of ordinary people by Grand Company, the Byzantine Empire, the Venetians, and the Templars was contrasted with their decent treatment by the Hospitalers. Societies which seem to meet the author’s approval may be democratic, like Avalon, or not so much, like Hermes as shown in MIRKHEIM, but I cannot think of any case where Anderson holds up a society where ordinary people are serfs of the “natural leaders”, or otherwise without legal protection or meaningful control over their own lives, as a good society. Similarly, Anderson’s heroes are not sociopaths; they may be willing to violate fiddling regulations, or to escape or oppose outright tyranny, but they have their moral compasses. I remember my first Anderson novel, SATAN’S WORLD, where David Falkayn heads alone into danger, imagining a little girl injured and screaming, her eyeballs cooked by a nuclear explosion. Falkayn may be something of a hedonist, but he has a conscience, and is prepared to risk his life to try to prevent that kind of horror from occurring.
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen
Thank you Sean. To clarify: you regard the decline of the US starting from the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912? Do you believe that America's zenith may have been during the "Gilded Age" of the 1890s or was it some other period? Also, do you have any model countries either current or historical?
@ Nicholas: Good to hear from you. I may have been unclear. It is my impression from occasional statements like ON's saying most (99.9%, 90%) people don't want liberty but security, that he (ON/PA) doesn't think much of the way most people are. (Where he gets these figures is unclear.) I get a sense of a the best society is where the "natural aristocracy" (bold, dynamic, entrepreneurial, people (usually men)) does great things , is self-regulating, and provides good benevolent leadership. There's a sense of "Wet Tory", "Miss Marple", "Daunton Abbey”, “Poldark" noblesse oblige- well-meaning, easy-going paternalism. I think of the Fredercksons in "TDoRT”, the Brodersons in "The Avatar", and the Kindred in "Mirkheim" as examples. Sooner or later the ordinary folks thoughtlessly and foolishly want more, away goes "limited government" and things go downhill from there.
I agree with you- I do not think any of P A s heroes are sociopaths. They all have consciences. (I wonder how Falkayn would have felt if he'd known his helping Merseia would have led to the Merseian Roidhunate, and helping Gorzun through Supermetals would have contributed to the sacking of Terra where there were probably a lot of “cooked kids”.) My point is that PA’s idealized highly individualistic, libertarian, "up by your own bootstraps, the sky's the limit, and the devil take the hindmost" society is very conducive to low-empathy people, many of whom are sociopaths. A disproportionate (4x normal) number of CEOs register high on the sociopathy scale (https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/18/why-psychopaths-are-so-good-at-getting-ahead.html, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-some-psychopaths-make-great-ceos/#29a2e4d2261a, https://www.businessinsider.com/psychopath-jon-ronson-ceo-traits-2015-5).
Cheers,
-kh
Kaor, Keith!
To address the remarks directed to me, yes, I would consider the decline of the US to have started around 1912. But that does not mean great things became impossible. According to Hord's theories, a society which made a wrong turn or disastrous mistake, has as much as 125 years to repair the damage. So, we would not necessarily see anything going seriously amiss for a long time. Many magnificent achievements were still done by the US after 1912. But the longer the damage is not repaired, the harder it becomes to do so. And if NOT repaired at all, then a breakdown will come. Old institutions fail, a "warring states" period might come, order might then be restored, for a time by a universal state, etc.
Sean
Thank you, Sean. If Spengler/Hord, etc. are correct, I fear we may be entering into the period of "Caesarism", and for Blish's McHinery and Erdsenov, we have Trump and Putin....Governmental legitimacy is rapidly "heading down the tubes".
-kh
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