Thursday 4 November 2021

Fenn And The Savage

The Fleet Of Stars, 4.

Fenn has learned about history:

famine
disease
poverty
toil
environmental destruction
slavery
private abuse
rampant crime
inherited hatreds
sexual distortion and oppression
superstitious dreads
government
war
regimentation
extortion
torture
 
All that is past. So far, so good. So why are there demonstrations and strange doctrines? Because people lack individual and collective self-determination. The message has to be that we need both self-determination and freedom from past evils, not, as Aldous Huxley's Savage thinks, a return to past evils:

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'

'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'All right, then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.'

There was a long silence.

'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.

-copied from here.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And the ending of "The Master Key" also comes to mind! Recall how angry Nicholas van Rijn commented on how often freedom and liberty came to an end because too many wanted an all powerful state to take care of their "needfuls," and relieve them of the burden of having to decide things for themselves. So I lean more to agreeing with the Savage, not Mustapha Mond.

Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD is one the two or three classic novels giving us depictions of totalitarianism. The other being, of course, Orwell's 1984. I recall Jonah Goldberg discussing these books in LIBERAL FASCISM. His view was BRAVE NEW WORLD gives us a "feminine," mommy state portrayal of totalitarianism; while 1984 is a brutally "masculine" depiction of the total state.

Anderson's stories "The High Ones" and "The Pugilist" gives us some of his views of how a global totalitarian regime ruling Earth might turn out. Both of them bad!

Ad astra!