See Such Things Can Happen.
Let me respond to Steve Matuchek's oblique commentary on our timeline:
human nature has come into existence through a process of change and can change itself further but not with secret police, concentration camps or mass slaughters;
the purpose of secret police etc was not to change human nature but to maintain a bureaucracy, therefore to prevent change;
having survived the twentieth century, the human race can move forward but not by maintaining the status quo which indeed threatens our survival;
it is urgently necessary to get some people off Earth;
however, immediate Terrestrial problems must continue to be addressed -
- nothing that has not been said here before and anything else takes us into controversy.
However, that is where we collectively are at right now, always at the cusp of change.
Also, our global predicament sounds like an sf novel.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul
Kaor, Paul!
Not only do I agree on the NECESSITY of mankind getting OFF this rock to settle other worlds (including O'Neill habitats), I also believe that the knowledge and wealth to be gained from using the resources of space will make it much easier to grapple with our problems on Earth. Some of those problems might even become irrelevant and unimportant because of doing that.
And I ardently hope Elon Musk manages to found his Mars colony! Because that would be a huge step in the right direction.
Ad astra! Sean
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Poul's point about regimes trying to changing human nature is a bit more complex than that.
If you try to make human beings behave in ways which contradict their "nature" -- that is, the genetics produced by their evolutionary history which set the limits to agency and to cultural variation -- they just won't do it, because essentially they can't.
They'll subvert your intentions one way or another, in fact in thousands of different ways.
Hence regimes which try to do this end up with layer on layer of increasingly radical coercion as they flail away at the "crooked timber of humanity, from which no straight thing can be made".
They also inevitably become more and more paranoid and conspiratorial-minded, simply because they have no way to account for the failure of their program, except to renounce its root concepts, which of course they won't do.
The Soviet regime is the classic and most-studied example. The closest it came to "working", under "high Stalinism", was also its most disastrous -- hence Stalin having to shoot his own census-takers in the late 1930's when they told him the population of the USSR was declining (basically because Stalin had starved, shot or otherwise killed so many).
Some of Stalin's hangmen were cynics or sadistic psychopaths (Beria, for instance, who was a ghastly pervert) but most of them were true believers who genuinely thought they were doing what they did to make the "new man".
In fact, of course, there is no "new man", simply a limited and endlessly repeated set of minor variations in the same old people.
Stalin's successors let up on the systematic terror, while remaining tyrannical, but when they did the system immediately began to ossify, and then to rot from within, until eventually it fell apart because virtually nobody loved it enough to kill or die for it.
It was much better at securing genuine devotion when it was at its most ferociously savage.
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