"Mankind does not live by bread - or citizen's credit - alone."
-Sandra Miesel IN Poul Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 2 (Riverdale, NY, February 2018), p. 17.
No, indeed. Mankind lives by meaningful activity and by cultural and spiritual development. One expression of spiritual development, of course, is "...every word that comes from the mouth of God."
Miesel continues:
"Abundance may be harder to endure than scarcity." (ibid.)
No! Given a choice between abundance and scarcity, which will you choose? Some will not cope with abundance. Others will. As the robot said:
"''There will always be men who think and dream and sing and carry on all the race has ever loved. The future belongs to them...'" (p. 15)
Such men will say to former generations, "Thank you for working so hard to bequeath us abundance. Now we will use it to do more than we ever could have done before."
They and those who follow their example will inherit the Earth and more than the Earth. That is not what will happen in this future history series but eventually psychotechnicians will mentally control cosmic energy in a Galactic civilization.
9 comments:
I think what Miesel meant was that without a struggle for existence, existence might become empty. That's a possibility.
Of course possible. We have historical experience of leisured classes. They run the entire gamut. Some individuals will indeed see existence as empty without struggle. Some (maybe not many) might give away all that they have in order to experience struggle. Some enjoy a life of pleasure and social interactions. Some take the opportunity to develop the arts and sciences: aristocratic artists, astronomers etc. Others become vile in every respect. Anyway, whatever happens and whether we eventually wind up in a good place, we certainly have a lot of turmoil immediately in front of us. I am learning some pretty dreadful things about the way the world is right now.
Of course a whole population with abundance and leisure would be not only quantitatively but also qualitatively different from a minority class with those advantages so the comparison is not exact. Also, there will be differences between transitional and post-transitional periods.
Kaor, Paul!
The third Earl of Rosse, in Ireland, was one example of those aristocratic artists and scientists. He was an astronomy enthusiast who spent much of his wealth building some of the most powerful telescopes of his day.
It's not inappropriate to add the Earl spent large sums in famine relief during the Potato Blight Famine.
And I still don't believe everybody will be happy in a hypothetical post scarcity economy. Most people will have no interest in the arts, sciences, and least of all philosophy. With nothing better to do many will eat too much, drink too much, quarrel and fight, or take up extremist, violent politics.
Your hopes are unrealistic.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Not everybody will be happy at least initially but surely a natural selection process will take place. After say three generations, people will grow up in and accept as their norm a social environment different from those that they read about in history.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't believe that at all. Our flaws and weaknesses, and propensities for being violent and quarrelsome, are innate, and are not going to be removed by mere prosperity. Again, I'm reminded of Chapter Six of GENESIS.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Well, we have certainly discussed all that before!
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Inevitably so.
Ad astra! Sean
BTW, this time I was saying only that a very big change in one part of society, i.e., production and distribution, should have very big effects on another part of the same society, i.e., individual psychologies and motivations. I was not this time saying what those effects should be. However, everything that is said is read in the light of what has previously been said.
I have presented many specific examples of how people behave one way in one set of circumstances, behave differently in another set of circumstances and are bound to behave differently again in a whole new set of circumstances in future. What I ask for is discussion of these examples not repetition of the dogma, "propensity for violence." If that is merely repeated every time, then there is indeed no point in trying to have a discussion.
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