"One stalking murderer can terrorize a city." (p. 418)
Yes.
"One self-infatuated dictator can turn nations into prison camps and torture chambers." (ibid.)
No. He is powerful only when obeyed and can be assassinated by any of his bodyguards. How many people must obey orders and cooperate with each other to operate armies, police forces, prisons and torture chambers?
"One warped prophet can preach a creed whose fanatics butcher millions of innocents." (ibid.)
Only in a society with social causes of fanaticism. Otherwise, the prophet is a lone street preacher or a mental patient.
"Why, one honest but pushy bureaucrat -" (ibid.)
Valeria laughs when she remembers the IRS snooper.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Unfortunately, I cannot agree with all of your comments here. Because there HAS been too many "self infatuated dictators who HAVE done enormous harm. I only need to list a few like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, etc., to show the fallacy in your statement. All of these tyrants and more have had millions of people carrying out their orders, many of them willingly.
And the "prophet" Steve plainly had in mind was Mohammed. Whose followers, despite being at first a minority, still took over and unified Arabia, and turned outward to carry out vast conquests.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that human beings are not isolates. If you force people to act as if they believe something, for example, many of them will fairly quickly come to sincerely believe it. Most people adopt the zeitgeist of their social reference group quite automatically.
This is why much of what we think of as agency is an illusion. Physical law constrains what you can do, but your social existence/environment constrains what you can -want- to do.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree! It takes determination and a carefully thought out opposing system of belief to continuously refuse increasingly sincere assent to a faith, philosophy, or ideology which had either been forcibly imposed on one's society or had become dominant. Such an "imposition" does not always succeed, as was the case in Ireland (where Protestantism failed to displace Catholicism), but in many cases it will.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: in Ireland there was the additional complication that first, the English governments didn't -consistently- try to force the Irish(*) into conformity with the Church of England, and secondarily that the English and Scottish colonists there didn't really -want- the natives to become Protestants, because that would have meant accepting them as social and political equals.
If the Irish had converted to Anglicanism -en masse-, it would have presented the English government with a very pretty pickle of a problem.
(*) not the bulk of the population. They -did- try, and fairly successfully, to force the landowning classes to either become Protestant or go into exile.
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