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Canopus says we must not waste or spoil,
Canopus tells us not to use violence on each other
and had heard these words being whispered or said or sung as she left.
Sais had grown in every way in those two years. Her father remained an amiable, laughing man who could not keep anything in his head, though he had guarded her everywhere they went, since ‘Canopus said so.’ While of course in no way approaching the marvellous quick-mindedness and mental development of the time ‘before the Catastrophe’ – as the songs and tales were now putting it – she had in fact become steadier-minded, clearer, more able to apprehend and to keep, and this was because she had carried the Signature and had guarded it. She was a brave girl – that I had known before sending her out – and a strong one. But now I could sit with her and talk, and this was real talk, a real exchange, because she could listen. It was slow, for that starved brain kept switching off, a blank look would come into her eyes, then she would shake herself and set herself to listen, to take in.
One day she handed me back the Signature, though I had not asked her for it. She was pleased with herself that she had managed to keep it safe and it was hard for her to let go of it. I took it back, only temporarily, though she did not know that, and told her that now the most important part of what she was to learn and do was just beginning. For quite soon I had to leave Shikasta, leave for Canopus, and she would remain as custodian of the truth about Shikasta, which she must learn, and guard and impart to anybody who would listen to her.
She wept. So did her father David. And I would have liked to weep. These unfortunate creatures had such a long ordeal in front of them, such a path of wandering and hazards and dangers – but these they did not seem anywhere near being able to understand.
I let them recover fully from their journey, and then I got the three of us together in a space between huts near where the central fire burned, and I laid the Signature on the earth between us, and I got them used to the idea of listening to instruction. After some days of this, while others had seen us, and some had stood listening a little way off, wondering, and even interested, I asked that all of the people of the settlement, who were not actually hunting or on guard, or in some way attending to the maintenance of the tribe – for now one had to call them that – should sit with us, every day, for an hour or so and listen. They must learn to listen again, to understand that in this way they could gain information. For they had forgotten it entirely. They remembered nothing of how the Giants had instructed them, could understand only what they could see, when I rubbed stones over a hide to soften it, or shook sour milk to make butter. Yet at night they did listen to David, singing of ‘the old days,’ and then they sang too …
Soon, every day, at the hour when the sun went, just after the evening meal, I talked, and they listened; they would even acknowledge what I said in words that came out from the past, in a fugitive opening of memory – and then their eyes would turn aside, and wander. Suddenly they weren’t there. How can I describe it? Only with difficulty, to Canopeans!
What I told these Shikastans was this.
Before the Catastrophe, in the Time of the Giants, who had been their friends and mentors, and who had taught them everything, Shikasta had been an easy pleasant world, where there was little danger or threat. Canopus was able to feed Shikasta with a rich and vigorous air, which kept everyone safe and healthy, and above all, made them love each other. But because of an accident, this substance-of-life could not reach here as it had, could reach this place only in pitifully small quantities. This supply of finer air had a name. It was called SOWF – the substance-of-we-feeling – I had of course spent time and effort on working out an easily memorable syllable. The little trickle of SOWF that reached this place was the most precious thing they had, and would keep them from falling back to animal level. I said there was a gulf between them and the other animals of Shikasta, and what made them higher was their knowledge of SOWF. SOWF would protect and preserve them. They must reverence SOWF.
For they could waste it, spend it, use it in the wrong way. It was for this reason they must never pervert themselves in the ruins of the old cities or dance among the Stones. This was why they must never, if they came on sources of intoxication, allow themselves intoxication. But coming from Canopus to Shikasta was a small steady trickle of this substance, and would continue to come, always. This was a promise from Canopus to Shikasta. In due time – I did not say thousands upon thousands of years! – this trickle would become a flood. And their descendants could bathe in it as they played now in the crystal rivers. But there would not be any descendants if they did not take care to preserve themselves. If they, those who sat before me now, listening to these precious revelations, did not guard themselves they would become worse than animals. They must not spoil themselves by taking too much of the substance of Shikasta. They must not use others. They must not let themselves become animals who lived only to eat and to sleep and to eat again – no, a part of their lives must be set aside for the remembrance of Canopus, memory of the substance-of-we-feeling, which was all they had.
And there was more, and worse. On Shikasta there were enemies, wicked people, enemies of Canopus, who were stealing the SOWF. These enemies enslaved Shikastans, when they could. They did this by encouraging those qualities that Canopus hated. They thrived when they hurt each other, or used each other – they delighted in any manifestation of the absence of substance-of-we-feeling. To outwit their enemies, Shikastans must love each other, help each other, always be equals with each other, and never take each other’s goods or substance … This is what I told them, day after day, while the Signature lay glinting there, in the light that fled from the evening sky, and the light of the flames that burned up as night came.
Meanwhile, Sais was my most devoted assistant. She chose, using faculties that seemed to revive in her, individuals that seemed to her most promising, and repeated these lessons, over and over again. She said them and she sang them, and David made new songs and stories.
When enough people in this settlement were sure of this knowledge, I said, they must travel everywhere over Shikasta and teach it. They must be sure that everyone heard this news, and above all, remembered.
And then it was time for me to leave and go to Zone Six. I put the Signature into Sais’s hand before everyone, and said that she was the custodian of it.
I did not say that it was the means of keeping the flow of SOWF from Canopus to Shikasta, but I knew they would soon believe it. And I had to leave her something to strengthen her.
Then I told them that I was going to return to Canopus and that one day I would come again.
I left the tribe one morning very early, as the sun was rising over the clearing that held the settlement. I listened to the birds arguing above me in the ancient trees, and I held out my fingers to a little goat who was a pet, and who came trotting after me. I sent it back, and I went to the river, where it was very wide and deep and strong, and would sweep me well away from the settlement so that no one would find my body. I let myself down into it and swam out into the current.
I now return to my visit in the Last Days.
It was necessary that Taufiq should cause himself to be born into the minority race of the planet, the white or pale-skinned peoples indigenous to the northern areas. The city he had chosen was not on the site of one of the Mathematical Cities of the Great Time, though some of the present cities were in fact built on such sites – it goes without saying, without any idea of their potentialities. This site had never been up to much. It was low, had been marshy for much of its recent history, when the climate had been wet. The soil was always damp and enervating. Nothing about the place had ever been naturally conducive to the high energies, though for certain purposes and in certain conditions it had been attuned and used, though temporarily, by us. It was the main city of a small island that had, because of its warlike and acquisitive qualities, overrun and dominated a good part of the globe, but had recently been driven back.
Taufiq was John, a name he had used quite often in his career – Jan, Jon, Sean, Yahya, Khan, Ivan, and so on. He was John Brent-Oxford, and the parents he had chosen were healthy honest people, neither too high nor too low in the society, which, since it suffered the most cumbersome division into classes and castes, all suspicious of each other, was a matter of importance and of careful judgment.
Taufiq’s undertaking was, in order to accomplish what he had to do, to become a person skilled in the regulations with which the various, always warring or quarrelling individuals, or sections of society, controlled themselves and each other. And he had achieved this. His youth had been spent intelligently, he had equipped himself, and was outstanding at an early age. Just as in higher spheres promising youngsters are watched by people they know nothing about, though they may wonder or guess, so in lower spheres of activity possibilities are prepared for those who prove themselves, and John was from childhood observed by ‘people of influence’, as the Shikastan phrase goes. But the ‘influences’ were by no means all of the same kind!
In this corrupt and ghastly age the young man could not avoid having put on him many pressures to leave the path of duty, and it was very early – he was not more than twenty-five years old – that he succumbed. Furthermore, he knew that he was doing something wrong. The young often have moments of clear thinking, which as they grow older become fewer, and muddied. He had kept alive in some part of him a knowledge that he was ‘destined’ to do something or other. He felt this as pure and unsullied, but – more often and more deeply as he grew older – ‘impractical’. That he did know quite well what he was doing is shown by his tendency to laugh apologetically at certain moments, with the remark that ‘he had been unable to resist temptation.’ Yet these words on the face of it had little to do with the obvious and recognized mores of his society, which was why it was essential to laugh. The laugh paid homage to these modes and mores. He was being ridiculous, the laugh said … yet he was never without uneasiness about what he was doing, the choices he had made.
It was necessary for him to be at a certain place at a certain time, in order to play a role that was essential in our handling of the crisis that faced Shikasta. He was to aim for a position – not only in his own country’s legal system – but a leading one in the system of northern countries which unified, or attempted to, that part of the northern hemisphere which recently had conquered and despoiled a good part of the planet, and which had until very recently been continually at war among themselves. He was to become a reliable and honest person, in this sphere. At a time of corruption, personal and public, he was to become known as incorruptible, unbribable, disinterested, straight-speaking.
But he was only just out of the last of his educational establishments, an elite one, for the production of the administrative class, when he took a false turning. Instead of going into a junior position in the Councils of the aforesaid bloc of northern countries, which was the position planned for him by us (and by him, of course, as Taufiq), he took a job in a law firm which was known for the number of its members who went into politics.
World War II was just over – Shikastan terminology. [SeeHistory of Shikasta, VOLS. 2955-3015, The Century of Destruction.] He had fought in it, seen much ferocity, spoiling, suffering. His judgments had been affected: his whole being – just like everybody else. He saw himself in a crucial role – as indeed he should – but one of the strongest of the false ideas of that epoch, politics, had entered into him. It was not as simple as that he wanted crude power, crude authority: no, he visualized himself ‘influencing things for the good’. He was an idealist: a word describing people who described themselves as intending good, not self-interest at the expense of others.
And in parentheses I report here that this was true of a good many of our citizens – to borrow a Shikastan word – of that time. They turned into wrong and destructive paths believing that they were better than others whose belief in self-interest was open and expressed, better because they, and they alone, knew how the practical affairs of the planet should be conducted. An emotional reaction to the sufferings of Shikasta seemed to them a sufficient qualification for curing them.
The attitudes outlined in this paragraph define ‘polities’, ‘political parties’, ‘political programmes’. Nearly all political people were incapable of thinking in terms of interaction, of cross-influences, of the various sects and ‘parties’ forming together a whole, wholes – let alone of groups of nations making up a whole. No, in entering the state of mind where ‘politics’ was ruler, it was always to enter a crippling partiality, a condition of being blinded by the ‘correctness’ of a certain viewpoint. And when one of these sects or ‘parties’ got power, they nearly always behaved as if their viewpoint could be the only right one. The only good one: when John chose a sect, he was in his own mind motivated by the highest ideas and ideals. He saw himself as a saviour of some kind, dreamed of himself as leader of the nation. From the moment he joined this group of lawyers, he met with very few people who thought differently from him. On various occasions members of our staff attempted to influence him, tried to remind him, indirectly of course, but none of them succeeded: the ways of thinking and being that he had taken to the borders of Shikasta were now so buried in him that they surfaced only rarely, in dreams, or in moments of remorse and panic that he could not ascribe to their right cause.
He had temporarily been written off. If it happened – so the judgment went on Canopus – that by some at present unforeseen processes Taufiq would ‘come to himself' – many such revealing phrases were common on Shikasta – and very often people apparently quite lost to us, at least temporarily, did ‘come to themselves’, ‘see the light’, and so on, quite often due to some awful shock or trauma of the kind Shikasta was so prodigal with, then, and then only, could trouble be spent on him. We were all so pressed, so thinly spread, and the situation on the planet so desperate.
One of my tasks was to observe him, to assess his present state, and if possible, to administer a reminder.
He was in his early fifties: that is, he was well past the halfway mark in the pitifully brief life which was all that Shikastans could now expect. As it happened he was scheduled for a longer life than most: his final assignment called for him to be about seventy-five when he would represent the aged. A respected representative: though at the moment it was hard to see how this could be brought about.
He lived in a house in an affluent district of the city, in a style which he would have described as moderate, was not excessive contrasted with what was usual then in that geographical area, but according to how it was to be judged very soon after – by global standards – in a shameful, wasteful, and profligate way. He had two families. A first wife had four children by him, and lived in another part of the city. His present wife had two children. The children were all indulged, spoiled, unfitted for what lay ahead. The women’s lives were devoted to supporting him, his ambitions. Both felt for him emotions characteristic of anyone who had ever been close to him. He was a person who had always provoked people into extremes of liking and disliking. He influenced people. He changed lives – for good and bad. A powerful inner drive (something supremely valuable which had as it were slipped out of true) had caused his life – and again this was hardly unusual in those times – to resemble where a swathe of forest fire had passed: everything extreme: blackened earth, destroyed animals and vegetation, and then stronger brilliant growth to follow, a change in the genetic patternings, potential of all kinds.
In appearance he was ordinary: dark hair, dark eyes in which even now I liked to imagine I could see traces of those far-distant ancestors, the Giants. A pale skin which possibly came from the genetic freaks among the Giants. His sturdy energetic body reminded me of the Natives. But of course by now there were so many admixtures, from the Sirian experiments, the Shammat spies, and others.
Like all people in public life at that period, he had public and private personalities. This was governed by the fact that no such person could ever tell the truth to the people he was supposed to represent. Some sort of attack in the personality was essential equipment: persuasiveness, forcefulness, charm. And it was necessary to use methods that in other times, places, planets, would have been described as deceitful, lying, and in fact criminal. The qualities prized in ‘public servants’ on Shikasta were, almost invariably, the most superficial and irrelevant imaginable, and could only have been accepted in a time of near total debasement and falseness. This was true of all sects, groupings, ‘parties’: for what was remarkable about this particular time was how much they all resembled each other, while they spent most of their energies in describing and denigrating differences that they imagined existed between them.
John had become a national figure by the time he was forty. This was because he was in certain positions and places: not because he was more than ordinarily competent, or had more than the usual grasp of public affairs – seen from local viewpoints, of course. He was handicapped because of his self-division. His suppressed inner qualities made him disappointed with what he was. He knew he had greater qualities than any he was using but did not know what they were. This restlessness had caused him to drink too much, indulge in bouts of self-denigration and cynicism. He was not respected in ways that matter, and he knew it. He was only another among the hundreds, the thousands, of the politicians of the globe of whom nothing much was to be expected – certainly not by the people they were supposed to represent. These might work, fight, even commit crimes to get ‘their’ representatives into power, but after that they did not consider they had any responsibility for their choices. For a feature, perhaps a predominant feature of the inhabitants of this planet, was that their broken minds allowed them to hold, and act on – even forcibly and violently – opinions and sets of mind that a short time later – years, a month, even a few minutes – they might utterly repudiate.
At the time when I located his dwelling, and positioned myself (of course well ensconced in Zone Six) where I could take in as much as was needed to make my decisions, and to influence him, if possible, he was in a period of intense emotional activity.
He had choices to make. Inwardly he knew this was another crisis for him. The political faction he represented had just been deprived of power. His faction had been in and out of a governing position several times since the Second World War (or as we put it, the Second Intensive Phase of the Twentieth Century War) and it was not this that was affecting him. Pressure was being put on him (indirectly by us) to return full-time to his legal firm and become active there, for he would be enabled to cultivate that kind of reputation which is most solidly based: among people who work in the same sphere as oneself. If he did this, it would still be time for him to take on a series of cases in ways which would be useful. The other work offered to him was in the Councils of the northerly bloc of countries. But it was a high position, he did not have the qualities to sustain it, and we knew that he would not be in exactly the right place to take up the defence of the white races at the moment when they were to be threatened with extermination. He would not have the necessary qualities. From our point of view, his acceptance of this post would be a bad mistake.
His present wife thought so, too. She had an inkling of what could happen. She did not like him as an impassioned sectarian. Neither had his first wife. Both women in fact had married him because of being attracted to his hidden unused powers or potential, which he then did not fulfil, and this was the real reason for their dissatisfaction with him – which fact they did not understand, and this caused in them all kinds of bitternesses and frustrations. This second marriage was likely to break up. Because of all this he was in mental breakdown. His home was a seethe of emotions and conflict. [See History of Shikasta, VOL. 3012, Mental Instability During the Century of Destruction. SECTION 5. PUBLIC FIGURES.] He had broken down before, and had prolonged treatment. In fact, most of the politicians of that time needed psychiatric support, because of the nature of their preoccupations: an unreality at the very heart of their everyday decision-making, thinking, functioning.
I watched him for some days. He was in a large room at the top of his house, a place set aside for his work, and where his family did not enter. Because he was alone, the ghastly charm of his public self was not in use. He was pacing up and down, his hair dishevelled (the exact disposition of head hair was of importance in that epoch), his eyes reddened and unable to maintain a focus. He had been drinking steadily for weeks. As he paced he groaned and muttered, he would bend over and straighten himself, as if to ease inner pain; he sat and clasped himself with both arms, hands gripping his shoulders, or he flung himself down on a day-bed and slept for a few moments, starting up to resume his restless pacing. He had decided to take the position with the northern bloc. He knew this was a mistake, and yet did not know. His rational self, the one he relied on – and indeed he possessed a fine, clear reasoning mind – could see nothing but opportunities for his ambition … which was never described to him in terms other than ‘progress’, ‘justice’, and so forth. He imagined this northern bloc becoming ever more powerful, successful, satisfying to all concerned. And yet the general collapse of the world order was apparent to everybody by then. That problems were not to be solved by the ways of thinking then accepted by partisan politics was also evident: certain minorities, and some of them influential ones, were putting forth alternative ways of thought, and these could not but appeal to John, or Taufiq … and yet he was committed to patterns of partisan thinking, and must be for as long as he was a politician. And he did not want his marriage to break up. Nor did he want to disappoint these two children as he had the children of his first marriage – he feared his progeny, as the people then tended to do. But of that later.
But if he stayed as a member of his local parliament, he would feel even more unused and frustrated than he had been – this was not even an alternative for him.
And then, jumping up from his disordered bed in his disordered room, or flinging himself down, or rocking, or’ pacing, he visualized the other possibility, that he should return seriously to his law firm and watch for opportunities to use himself in ways in which he could easily envisage … extraordinary how attractive this prospect was … and yet there was nothing there to feed this ambition of his … he would be stepping out of the limelight, the national limelight, let alone the glamour of the wider fields open to him. And yet … and yet … he could not help being drawn to what had been planned for him, and by him before this entrance to Shikasta.
Here I intervened.
It was the middle of the night. It was quiet, in this pleasant and sheltered street. The din of the machines they all lived with was stilled.
Not a sound in the house. There was a single source of light in the corner of this room.
His eyes kept returning to it … he was in a half-tranced state, from fatigue and from alcohol.
‘Taufiq,’ I said. ‘Taufiq … remember! Try and remember!’
This was to his mind, of course. He did not move, but he tensed, and came to himself, and sat listening. His eyes were alert. In those strong black eyes, thoughtful now, and all there, I recognized my friend, my brother.
‘Taufiq,’ I said. ‘What you are thinking now is right. Hold on to it. Act on it. It isn’t too late. You took a very wrong bad turn when you went into politics. That wasn’t for you! Don’t make things worse.’
Still he didn’t move. He was listening, with every atom of himself. He turned his head cautiously, and I knew he was wondering if he would see somebody, or something, in the shadows of his room. He was half remembering me. But he saw nothing as he turned his head this way and that, searching into the corners and dark places. He was not afraid.
But he was shocked. The intervention of my words into his swirling half-demented condition was too much for him. He suddenly got up, flung himself down and was instantly asleep.
He dreamed. I fed in the material that would shape his dream …
He and I were together in the projection room of the Planetary Demonstration Building on Canopus.
We were running scenes from Shikasta, recent scenes, of the new swarming millions upon millions upon millions – poor short-lived savages now, with the precious substance-of-we-feeling so limited and being shared among so many, the tiniest allowance for each individual, their little drop of true feeling … we were both overwhelmed with pity for the fate of the Shikastans, who could not help themselves, while they fought and hated and stole and half starved. Both of us had known Shikasta at such different times, he much more often and more recently than I. We were there together in the projection room because he had been asked to make this journey, and to take up this task.
There was no question of his refusing: we did not refuse such requests. Or some of us did not! [See History of Canopus, VOL. 1,752,357, Disagreement re: Policy for Shikasta, Formerly Rohanda. SUMMARY CHAPTER.] But it was as if he had been asked to allow himself to be made lunatic, mad, deranged, and then put into a den of murdering savages. He agreed at once. Just as I agreed, shortly afterwards, when it was evident that he had failed.
He was lying utterly still on his bed. This dream caused him to stir and almost come to the surface again. But he sank back, exhausted.
He dreamed of a high bare landscape, full of coloured mountains, a brilliant unkind sky, everything beautiful and compelling, but when you looked close it was all desert. Cities had died here, been blasted to poisoned sand. Famine and death and disease were denuding these deadly plains. The beauty had a sombre deathlike under-face: yet was soaked with the emotion of longing, wanting, false need, and these were coming from Zone Six, and causing this nightmare, which made him start up, muttering and groaning, and rush for water. He drank glass after glass, and dashed water on to his face, and he resumed his pacing. As the sky outside lightened, and the night sank down he paced, and paced. He was sober now, but really very ill.
A decision would have to be made. And soon, or he would die with the stress of it.
All that day he stayed in that room high up in his house. His wife came to him with food, and he thanked her, but in a careless, uncaring way that caused her then and there to decide she would divorce him. He left the food untouched. His eyes had lost life. Were staring. Were violent. He flung himself down to sleep, and then jumped up again. He was afraid. He feared to encounter me, his friend, who was his other self, his brother.
He was being terrified to the point of lunacy by Canopus, who was his home and his deepest self.
When he did at last fall asleep, because he could not keep himself awake, I made him dream of us, a band of his fellows, his real companions. He smiled as he slept. He wept, tears soaking his face, as he walked and talked in his dream with us, with himself.
And he woke smiling, and went downstairs to tell his wife he had made up his mind. He was going to take up this new position, this new important job. His manner as he told her this was full of the lying affability of his public self.
But I knew that what I had fed into him as he slept would stay there and change him. I knew – I could foresee, and exactly, for there was a picture of it in my inner sight – that later in the frightful time in front of us, I, a young man, would confront him, and say to him some exact and functioning words. He would remember. An enemy – for he was to be that for a time – would become a friend again, would come to himself.
History of Shikasta, VOL. 3012, The Century of Destruction.
EXCERPT FROM SUMMARY CHAPTER.
During the previous two centuries, the narrow fringes on the north-west of the main landmass of Shikasta achieved technical superiority over the rest of the globe, and, because of this, conquered physically or dominated by other means large numbers of cultures and civilizations. The Northwest fringe people were characterized by a peculiar insensitivity to the merits of other cultures, an insensitivity quite unparalleled in previous history. An unfortunate combination of circumstances was responsible. (1) These fringe peoples had only recently themselves emerged from barbarism. (2) The upper classes enjoyed wealth, but had never developed any degree of responsibility for the lower classes, so the whole area, while immeasurably more wealthy than most of the rest of the globe, was distinguished by contrasts between extremes of wealth and poverty. This was not true for a brief period between Phases II and III of the Twentieth Century War. [See VOL. 3009, Economies of Affluence.] (3) The local religion was materialistic. This was again due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances: one was geographical, another the fact that it had been a tool of the wealthy classes for most of its history, another that it retained even less than most religions of what its founder had been teaching. [See VOLS. 998 and 2041, Religions as Tools of Ruling Castes.] For these and other causes, its practitioners did little to mitigate the cruelties, the ignorance, the stupidity, of the Northwest fringers. On the contrary, they were often the worst offenders. For a couple of centuries at least, then, a dominant feature of the Shikastan scene was that a particularly arrogant and self-satisfied breed, a minority of the minority white race, dominated most of Shikasta, a multitude of different races, cultures, and religions which, on the whole, were superior to that of the oppressors. These white Northwest fringers were like most conquerors of history in denuding what they had overrun, but they were better able than any other in their ability to persuade themselves that what they did was ‘for the good’ of the conquered: and it is here that the above-mentioned religion is mostly answerable.
World War I – to use Shikastan nomenclature (otherwise the First Intensive Phase of the Twentieth Century War) – began as a quarrel between the Northwest fringers over colonial spoils. It was distinguished by a savagery that could not be matched by the most backward of barbarians. Also by stupidity: the waste of human life and of the earth’s products was, to us onlookers, simply unbelievable, even judged by Shikastan standards. Also by the total inability of the population masses to understand what was going on: propaganda on this scale was tried for the first time, using methods of indoctrination based on the new technologies, and was successful. What the unfortunates were told who had to give up life and property – or at the best, health – for this war, bore no relation at any time to the real facts of the matter; and while of course any local group or culture engaged in war persuades itself according to the exigencies of self-interest, never in Shikastan history, or for that matter on any planet – except for the planets of the Puttioran group – has deception been used on this scale.
This war lasted for nearly five of their years. It ended in a disease that carried off six times as many people as those killed in the actual fighting. This war slaughtered, particularly in the Northwest fringes, a generation of their best young males. But – potentially the worst result – it strengthened the position of the armament industries (mechanical, chemical, and psychological) to a point where from now on it had to be said that these industries dominated the economies and therefore the governments of all the participating nations. Above all, this war barbarized and lowered the already very low level of accepted conduct in what they referred to as ‘the civilized world’ – by which they meant, mostly, the Northwest fringes.
This war, a phase of the Twentieth Century War, laid the bases for the next.
Several areas, because of the suffering caused by the war, exploded into revolution, including a very large area, stretching from the Northwest fringes thousands of miles to the eastern ocean. This period saw the beginning of a way of looking at governments, judged ‘good’ and ‘bad’ not by performance, but by label, by name. The main reason was the deterioration caused by war: one cannot spend years sunk inside false and lying propaganda without one’s mental faculties becoming impaired. (This is a fact that is attested to by every one of our emissaries to Shikasta!)
Their mental processes, for reasons not their fault never very impressive, were being rapidly perverted by their own usages of them.
The period between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Second Intensive Phase contained many small wars, some of them for the purpose of testing out the weapons shortly to be employed on a massive scale. As a result of the punitive suffering inflicted on one of the defeated contestants of World War I by the victors, a Dictatorship arose there – a result that might easily have been foreseen. The Isolated Northern Continent, conquered only recently by emigrants from the Northwest fringes, and conquered with the usual disgusting brutality, was on its way to becoming a major power, while the various national areas of the Northwest fringes, weakened by war, fell behind. Frenzied exploitation of the colonized areas, chiefly of Southern Continent I, was intensified to make up for the damages sustained because of the war. As a result, native populations, exploited and oppressed beyond endurance, formed resistance movements of all kinds.
The two great Dictatorships established themselves with total ruthlessness. Both spread ideologies based on the suppression and oppression of whole populations of differing sects, opinions, religions, local cultures. Both used torture on a mass scale. Both had followings all over the world, and these Dictatorships, and their followers, saw each other as enemies, as totally different, as wicked and contemptible – while they behaved in exactly the same way.
The time gap between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II was twenty years.
Here we must emphasize that most of the inhabitants of Shikasta were not aware that they were living through what would be seen as a hundred-years’ war, the century that would bring this planet to almost total destruction. We make a point of this, because it is nearly impossible for people with whole minds – those who have had the good fortune to live (and we must never forget that it is a question of our good fortune) within the full benefits of the substance-of-we-feeling – it is nearly impossible, we stress, to understand the mentation of Shikastans. With the world’s cultures being ravaged and destroyed, from end to end, by viciously inappropriate technologies, with wars raging everywhere, with whole populations being wiped out, and deliberately, for the benefit of ruling castes, with the wealth of every nation being used almost entirely for war, for preparations for war, propaganda for war, research for war; with the general levels of decency and honesty visibly vanishing, with corruption everywhere – with all this, living in a nightmare of dissolution, was it really possible, it may be asked, for these poor creatures to believe that ‘on the whole’ all was well?
The reply is – yes. Particularly, of course, for those already possessed of wealth or comfort – a minority; but even those millions, those billions, the ever-increasing hungry and cold and unbefriended, for these, too, it was possible to live from meal to scant meal, from one moment of warmth to the next.
Those who were stirred to ‘do something about it’ were nearly all in the toils of one of the ideologies which were the same in performance, but so different in self-description. These, the active, scurried about like my unfortunate friend Taufiq, making speeches, talking, engaged in interminable processes that involved groups sitting around exchanging information and making statements of good intent, and always in the name of the masses, those desperate, frightened, bemused populations who knew that everything was wrong but believed that somehow, somewhere, things would come right.
It is not too much to say that in a country devastated by war, lying in ruins, poisoned, in a landscape blackened and charred under skies low with smoke, a Shikastan was capable of making a shelter out of broken bricks and fragments of metal, cooking himself a rat and drinking water from a puddle that of course tasted of oil and thinking ‘Well, this isn’t too bad after all …’
World War II lasted five years, and was incomparably worse in every way than the first. All the features of the first were present in the second, developed. The waste of human life now extended to mass extermination of civilian populations. Cities were totally destroyed. Agriculture was ruined over enormous areas. Again the armament industries flourished, and this finally established them as the real rulers of every geographical area. Above all, the worst wounds were inflicted in the very substance, the deepest minds, of the people themselves. Propaganda in every area, by every group, was totally unscrupulous, vicious, lying – and self-defeating – because in the long run, people could not believe the truth when it came their way. Under the Dictatorships, lies and propaganda were government. The maintenance of the dominance of the colonized parts was by lies and propaganda – these more effective and important than physical force; and the retaliation of the subjugated took the form, first of all and most importantly in influence, of lies and propaganda: this is what they had been taught by their conquerors. This war covered and involved the whole globe – the first war, or phase of the war, involved only part of it: there was no part of Shikasta by the end of World War II left unsubjected to untruth, lies, propaganda.
This war saw, too, the use of weapons that could cause total global destruction: it should go without saying, to the accompaniment of words like democracy, freedom, economic progress.
The degeneration of the already degenerate was accelerated.
By the end of World War II, one of the great Dictatorships was defeated – the same land area as saw the worst defeat in the first war. The Dictatorship which covered so much of the central landmass had been weakened, almost to the point of defeat, but survived, and made a slow, staggering recovery. Another vast area of the central landmass, to the east of this Dictatorship, ended half a century of local wars, civil wars, suffering, and over a century of exploitation and invasion by the Northwest fringes by turning to Dictatorship. The Isolated Northern Continent had been strengthened by the war and was now the major world power. The Northwest fringes on the whole had been severely weakened. They had to let go their grip of their colonies. Impoverished, brutalized – while being, formally, victors – they were no longer world powers. Retreating from these colonies they left behind technology, an idea of society based entirely on physical well-being, physical satisfaction, material accumulation – to cultures who, before encounter with these all-ravaging Northwest fringers, had been infinitely more closely attuned with Canopus than the fringers had ever been.
This period can be – is by some of our scholars – designated The Age of Ideology. [For this viewpoint see VOL. 3011, SUMMARY CHAPTER.]
The political groupings were all entrenched in bitterly defended ideologies.
The local religions continued, infinitely divided and subdivided, each entrenched in their ideologies.
Science was the most recent ideology. War had immeasurably strengthened it. Its ways of thought, in its beginnings flexible and open, had hardened, as everything must on Shikasta, and scientists, as a whole — we exclude individuals in this area as in all others – were as impervious to real experience as the religionists had ever been. Science, its basic set of mind, its prejudices, gripped the whole globe and there was no appeal. Just as individuals of our tendencies of mind, our inclinations towards the truth, our ‘citizens’ had had to live under the power and the threat of religions who would use any brutalities to defend their dogmas, so now individuals with differing inclinations and needs from those tolerated by science had to lead silent or prudent lives, careful of offending the bigotries of the scientific global governing class: in the service of national governments and therefore of war – an invisible global ruling caste, obedient to the warmakers. The industries that made weapons, the armies, the scientists who served them – these could not be easily attacked, since the formal picture of how the globe was run did not include this, the real picture. Never has there been such a totalitarian, all-pervasive, all-powerful governing caste anywhere: and yet the citizens of Shikasta were hardly aware of it, as they mouthed slogans and waited for their deaths by holocaust. They remained unaware of what ‘their’ governments were doing, right up to the end. Each national grouping developed industries, weapons, horrors of all kinds, that the people knew nothing about. If glimpses were caught of these weapons, the government would deny they existed. [See Historyof Shikasta, VOLS. 3013, 3014, and CHAPTER 9 this volume, Use of Moon as Military Base.] There were space probes, space weapons, explorations of planets, use of planets, rivalries over their moon, about which the populations were not told.
And here is the place to say that the mass of the populations, the average individual, were, was, infinitely better, more sane, than those who ruled them: most would have been appalled at what was being done by ‘their’ representatives. It is safe to say that if even a part of what was being kept from them had come to notice, there would have been mass risings across the globe, massacres of the rulers, riots … unfortunately, when peoples are helpless, betrayed, lied to, they possess no weapons but the (useless) ones of rioting, looting, mass murder, invective.
During the years following the end of World War II, there were many ‘small’ wars, some as vicious and extensive as wars in the recent past described as major. The needs of the armament industries, as much as ideology, dictated the form and intensities of these wars. During this period savage exterminations of previously autonomous ‘primitive’ peoples took place, mostly in the Isolated Southern Continent (otherwise known as Southern Continent II). During this period colonial risings were used by all the major powers for their own purposes. During this period psychological methods of warfare and control of civilian populations developed to an extent previously undreamed of.
Here we must attempt to underline another point which it is almost impossible for those with our set of mind to appreciate.
When a war was over, or a phase of war, with its submersion in the barbarous, the savage, the degrading, Shikastans were nearly all able to perform some sort of mental realignment that caused them to ‘forget’. This did not mean that wars were not idols, subjects for pious mental exercises of all sorts. Heroisms and escapes and braveries of local and limited kinds were raised into national preoccupations, which were in fact forms of religion. But this not only did not assist, but prevented, an understanding of how the fabric of cultures had been attacked and destroyed. After each war, a renewed descent into barbarism was sharply visible – but apparently cause and effect were not connected, in the minds of Shikastans.
After World War II, in the Northwest fringes and in the Isolated Northern Continent, corruption, the low level of public life, was obvious. The two ‘minor’ wars conducted by the Isolated Northern Continent reduced its governmental agencies, even those visible and presented to the public inspection, to public scandal. Leaders of the nation were murdered. Bribery, looting, theft, from the top of the pyramids of power to the bottom, were the norm. People were taught to live for their own advancement and the acquisition of goods. Consumption of food, drink, every possible commodity was built into the economic structure of every society. [VOL. 3009, Economies of Affluence.] And yet these repulsive symptoms of decay were not seen as direct consequences of the wars that ruled their lives.
During the whole of the Century of Destruction, there were sudden reversals: treaties between nations which had been at war, so that these turned their hostilities on nations only recently allies; secret treaties between nations actually at war; enemies and allies constantly changing positions, proving that the governing factor was in the need for war, as such. During this period every major city in the northern hemisphere lived inside a ring of terror: each had anything up to thirty weapons aimed at it, every one of which could reduce it and its inhabitants to ash in seconds – pointed from artificial satellites in the skies, directed from underwater ships that ceaselessly patrolled the seas, directed from land bases perhaps halfway across the globe. These were controlled by machines which everyone knew were not infallible – and everybody knew that more than once the destruction of cities and areas had been avoided by a ‘miracle’. But the populations were never told how often these ‘miracles’ had taken place – near-lethal accidents between machines in the skies, collisions between machines under the oceans, weapons only just not unleashed from the power bases. Looking from outside at this planet it was as if at a totally crazed species.
In large parts of the northern hemisphere was a standard of living that had recently belonged only to emperors and their courts. Particularly in the Isolated Northern Continent, the wealth was a scandal, even to many of their own citizens. Poor people lived there as the rich have done in previous epochs. The continent was heaped with waste, with wreckage, with the spoils of the rest of the world. Around every city, town, even a minor settlement in a desert, rose middens full of discarded goods and food that in other less favoured parts of the globe would mean the difference between life and death to millions. Visitors to this continent marvelled – but at what people could be taught to believe was their due, and their right.
This dominant culture set the tone and standard for most of Shikasta. For regardless of the ideological label attaching to each national area, they all had in common that technology was the key to all good, and that good was always material increase, gain, comfort, pleasure. The real purposes of life – so long ago perverted, kept alive with such difficulty by us, maintained at such a cost – had been forgotten, were ridiculed by those who had ever heard of them, for distorted inklings of the truth remained in the religions. And all this time the earth was being despoiled. The minerals were being ripped out, the fuels wasted, the soils depleted by an improvident and short-sighted agriculture, the animals and plants slaughtered and destroyed, the seas being filled with filth and poison, the atmosphere was corrupted – and always, all the time, the propaganda machines thumped out: more, more, more, drink more, eat more, consume more, discard more – in a frenzy, a mania. These were maddened creatures, and the small voices that rose in protest were not enough to halt the processes that had been set in motion and were sustained by greed. By the lack of substance-of-we-feeling.
But the extreme riches of the northern hemisphere were not distributed evenly among their own populations, and the less favoured classes were increasingly in rebellion. The Isolated Northern Continent and the Northwest fringe areas also included large numbers of dark-skinned people brought in originally as cheap labour to do jobs disdained by the whites – and while these did gain, to an extent, some of the general affluence, it could be said that looking at Shikasta as a whole, it was the white-skinned that did well, the dark-skinned poorly.
And this was said, of course, more and more loudly by the dark-skinned, who hated the white-skinned exploiters as perhaps conquerors have never before been hated.
Inside each national area everywhere, north and south, east and west, discontent grew. This was not only because of the gap between the well off and the poor, but because their way of life, where augmenting consumption was the only criterion, increasingly saddened and depressed their real selves, their hidden selves, which were unfed, were ignored, were starved, were lied to, by almost every agency around them, by every authority they had been taught to, but could not, respect.
Increasingly the two main southern continents were torn by wars and disorders of every kind – sometimes civil wars between blacks, sometimes between blacks and remnants of the old white oppression, and between rival sects and juntas and power groups. Local dictators abounded. Vast territories were denuded of forests, species of animals destroyed, tribes murdered or dispersed …
War. Civil War. Murder. Torture. Exploitation. Oppression and suppression. And always lies, lies, lies. Always in the name of progress, and equality and development and democracy.
The main ideology all over Shikasta was now variations on this theme of economic development, justice, equality, democracy.
Not for the first time in the miserable story of this terrible century, this particular ideology – economic justice, equality, democracy, and the rest – took power at a time when the economy of an area was at its most disrupted: the Northwest fringes became dominated by governments ‘of the left’, which presided over a descent into chaos and misery.
