"Who in their right minds would want a return of war, poverty, rampant criminality, disease, famine, cancerously swelling population, necessity to work no matter how nasty or deadening the work might be, mass lunacy, private misery, and death in less than a hundred years?" (p. 63)
That same question is posed at the end of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. There, peace and plenty are bought at the expense of rigid psychological conditioning and social stratification. Here, in Harvest Of Fire, people are driven to invent artificial communalities and individualities:
"...within the leveling huge impersonality of World Federation and cybercosm." (ibid.)
I am confident that human beings can end poverty while retaining individual and collective freedom. Whether they are about to succeed is another matter.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Your last sentence: I am not so confident! Even if we achieve a post-scarcity economy, I remain confident that human beings will find some means of ingeniously mucking up things.
Ad astra! Sean
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