"'Growth until wrong decisions bring breakdown...'"
-Poul Anderson, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra (Riverdale, NY, March 2012), pp. 339-606 AT III, p. 388.
Desai summarizes:
growth
wrong decisions
breakdown
wars
Imperial Pax
dissolution
reconstitution
disintegration
dark age
ruins of old society
new society beginning in the ruins
growth
etc
"'Technic civilization started on that road when the Polesotechnic League changed from a mutual-aid organization to a set of cartels. Tonight we are far along the way.'" (pp. 388-389)
With metaphorical appropriateness, he says, "Tonight...," not "Today..."
Desai and Flandry live during either the initial Pax or its reconstitution, I am not sure which. Later, Flandry tells Miriam Abrams that she and he are living during the interregnum between the principate and dominate phases of the Empire. I had thought that Molitor, the usurper, represented the dominate phase and therefore the reconstitution but maybe not. Desai says that a "'...centralized divine autocracy...'" (p. 388) still lies ahead.
We have summarized all this before. My present point is that I think that Desai's exposition captures something that we might feel:
that there is something wrong in society;
that we can see many symptoms but not identify any specific cause;
that people in pivotal positions might be able to set things right if only they knew what decisions to make;
that most of us are helpless most of the time;
that a catastrophe is bearing down on us.
I describe this as a feeling, not an analysis, and maybe not everyone feels it. To me, Desai's account rings true although that is certainly not to defend all its details.
2 comments:
Virtually all companies -aspire- to be cartels.(*)
The idea that an organization -of- companies wouldn't become an alliance of cartels was distinctly odd.
The Hanseatic League (the original model for the Polyesotechnic League) was most definitely cartelized and used violence against competitors -- and whole countries.
(*) take a look at Carnegie Steel in the 1880's and 1890's. It was perfectly willing to enter into market-sharing sub-rosa agreements with other steel companies... when times were good and everyone in the business was selling all the steel they could.
Then when there was a recession (or "panic" as they said back then) it broke the agreements and ruthlessly undercut its rivals, driving all of them it could into bankruptcy, which it could do because it had the lowest production costs in the business.
Then Carnegie got tired of running a business and wanted to enjoy life (and give away lots of money).
J.P. Morgan, the banker, wanted to turn the steel industry into a money-making mechanism; which Carnegie Steel had never been, because Carnegie's basic drive was to maximize market share, not return-on-capital.
So Carnegie sold out to the new US Steel, which had a virtual monopoly, 2/3 of the total US market in 1901.
And US Steel immediately started paying out far, far higher dividends than Carnegie Steel ever had -- Carnegie had driven down the profit margins on -everyone- in the business because it would grab market share any way it could.
This made owning US Steel stock a license to print money... for generations... and then -foreign- competitors ate US Steel's lunch because it had gotten fat and complacent and by the 1950's it was coasting on momentum and wasn't a technical leader any more.
This is a familiar cycle for established firms -- look at the "Big 3" US car-makers, for example.
Paul - To respond to your post:
Convincingly writing the "fall" element of a fictional "Rise and Fall" is challenging; most SF writers just skip over the "fall" and go to the aftermath - makes having a Campbellian hero be the protagonist that much easier. There's a reason Norman Spinrad wrote "The Iron Dream," after all. ;)
The flip side, of course, is the "rise" part; a story about "building" is always simpler than one about "maintaining;" look at most of what passes for SF these days.
Trying to write an entertaining fictional story about the high number of people who get up on time to go forth and work their shifts, go home, take care of the family and the neighborhood, and grow old and die loved but not famous, is "somewhat" more challenging. Nevil Shute did several works along those lines, "Trustee from the Toolroom" perhaps being the best example.
Even with the framing of a protagonist simply "standing their watch," even in wartime, it's not easy; it's the rare self-styled "MilSF" who ever manages to carry it off.
Richard McKennna, Thomas Hennegan, and Nicholas Monsarrat did far better at it than Robert Heinlein ever did in a "serious" novel, for example; Heinlein did better in his juveniles.
To give Anderson credit, in "The Night Face," his two protagonists are both trying to avoid destroying the Gwydiona, and one of the two dies because of that desire.
Heinlein's resolution of the plot would have been "different," to put it mildly. ;)
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