Chaos And Order

Reflecting on the Solar Minister of Security's hostility to the Solar Spice & Liquors Company, David Falkayn thinks:

"He loathes us because we've never either joined or toadied to the coalition of cartels, politicians, and bureaucrats. To him, we represent Chaos."
-Poul Anderson, The Rise Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2011), pp. 167-168.

How many works by Anderson present this basic conflict between freedom, "Chaos," and control, "Security"? For once, I will not try to write a complete list. In Anderson's first future history, the Psychotechnic Institute opposes not freedom miscalled chaos but real chaos: insanity; nationalism; war; totalitarianism. Totalitarian plots to impose order merely compound chaos. The Institute, if it had succeeded, would have (genuinely) reeducated, not (merely) indoctrinated.

In other works, those who value security try to eliminate those who prefer unpredictability. The earlier form of this conflict is between bureaucrats on the one side and entrepreneurs or explorers on the other. The later form is between superhuman artificial intelligences on the one side and the whole of humanity on the other. The transition occurs in Harvest Of Stars. Humanity is extinct in, ironically, Genesis.

Diomedean Evolution II

Intelligence requires a long childhood during which behavior is learned. Therefore, both parents must protect helpless infants and ignorant children. Diomedean adults are kept together not by permanent sexuality but by the need to cooperate to survive migration. The prolonged effort of migration concentrates sex hormones so that arrival in the tropics triggers indiscriminate mating. Children must all be born at about the same time if they and the mothers are to survive the long migration. The family is not a couple and their children but a matrilineal clan. However, Diomedeans living at sea near the equator have continual labor and sexuality and therefore also patriarchal monogamy. Migrators and sea-dwellers see each other as perverse.

A long childhood is our glory and our tragedy. Helpless, ignorant children can be:

educated or indoctrinated;
encouraged or intimidated;
taught how to think or told what to think.

The conflict between these two kinds of upbringing will decide the future of humanity. My upbringing: I was given good advice, which I ignored, and taught nonsense, which I took on board. No good, either way. I should have started zazen twenty years earlier. However, my daughter, now grown up, was not indoctrinated.

A human organism, as soon as it has been activated by social/linguistic interaction, has a unique and distinctive personality from an early age but I think that this comes from genes and environment, not from rebirth as many of my fellow meditators believe. The personality then responds to inputs which, however, can have contrary effects, as suggested above.

A possible future form of the conflict: Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic Institute began well, applying psychology, not imposing an ideology, but went wrong, doing too much too fast and taking disastrous short cuts, thus provoking a "Humanist" backlash. But that is in another future history.

Superdielectrics

Chapter 5 of Poul Anderson's The Snows Of Ganymede (New York, 1958), summarizing the downfall of the Psychotechnic Institute by presenting a lot of concentrated information in just four and a half pages, mentions one detail that is not developed anywhere else in the series:

"[The Humanist movement] was made the more dangerous by the general availability of superdielectrics, accumulators of fantastic capacity which could be charged from almost anything; cheap, simple energy sources for vehicles and weapons.
"The balance of military power was shifting away from central government and toward the small, fanatic group. It was no longer possible to enforce order." (p. 50)

Does this make sense? Yes, cheap energy sources fit with the kind of technological advances that are made in the series. And there has to be some explanation of how a popular movement was able to start an armed revolution.

However:

superdielectrics should be mentioned as part of the background of later stories;
I have argued that, in the social conditions described, small fanatic groups would not be able to attract mass support;
the armed forces, also using the new enemy sources, would outnumber and outmanoeuvre any small groups.

The Psychotechnic Institute II

I got one point wrong a couple of posts back here. Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History does include one story specifically about the Psychotechnic Institute.

The first four stories, collected as The Psychotechnic League (New York, 1981), are:

"Marius";
"Un-Man";
"The Sensitive Man";
"The Big Rain."

"Marius" introduces Valti (off-stage), Fourre and Rostomily. In "Un-Man," Fourre runs the UN Secret Service whose agents, the Un-Men, include a "Brotherhood" of Rostomily clones. Another Un-Man, not a Brother, stars in "The Big Rain." Valti's work is continued by the Psychotechnic Institute and "The Sensitive Man" is about two members of that Institute. Thus, the second, third and fourth stories follow, directly or indirectly, from the first.

However, the Institute works on two levels. It tries to change individuals and society:

"'The Institute is trying to do two things - create such a citizenry [intelligent, alert and tough enough to defend freedom against power] and simultaneously to build up a society which itself produces men of that kind and reinforces those traits in them. It can be done, given time.'" (p. 173)

The story dramatizes one changed individual, the title character, but otherwise, like other installments of the series, discusses changing society in the abstract. This is why I had not remembered any particular story as specifically focusing on the Institute. The Sensitive Man owes his enhanced powers to Tighe System training which can be discussed apart from the rest of the Institute's work.

In the later story, "Brake," a single character is a member of the Order of Planetary Engineers and of the Rostomily Brotherhood and has Tighe System training but is not a psychotechnician.