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I sat in exactly that spot where I once sat with Jarsum and the others when they heard their sentence and the sentence of Rohanda: where that building was, surrounded by the warm glowing patterns and stones of the created city, is a narrow street of hovels made with sun-baked mud, and every face was deformed, inwardly or outwardly.
There are no eyes there that can meet your own frankly, without suspicion or fear, in acknowledgement of kinship.
This is a terrible city. And our envoys say that they are the same, all these great cities, every one engaged in warring, cheating, making treaties which are dissolved in treachery, stealing each other’s goods, snatching each other’s flocks, capturing each other’s people to make slaves.
There are the rich, but only a few; and the innumerable slaves and servants who are the owned and the used.
Women are slaves to their beauty, and they regard their children as secondary to the admiration of men.
Men treat the women according to their degree of beauty, and the children only according to how they will advance themselves, their names, their properties.
Sex in them is twisted, broken: their desperation with the little dream that is their life between birth and death feeds sex to a famine and a flame.
What is to be done with them? What can be done?
Only what has had to be done so often before, with the children of Shammat, Shammat the disgraced and the disgraceful …
My friend Taufiq has gone on a journey to the Northwest fringes, and he has said it is because he does not want to be here to see again what he has seen before.
I and your permanent agent Jussel left the cities and went among the herdsmen on the plains. We travelled from herd to herd, tribe to tribe. These are simple people, with the straightforwardness of those who deal close to the necessities of nature. I found descendants of Davidic stock, and they showed honesty, hospitality, and above all a hunger for something different.
With a tribe that manifested these characteristics more than the others, we stayed as ordinary travellers, and when affinity was accepted by them, showing itself as trust and wanting us to stay on with them, we revealed ourselves as from ‘somewhere else’, and on a mission. They spoke of us as Lords, Gods, and Masters. These terms remain in their songs and their tales.
We told them if they would maintain certain practices, which had to be done exactly, and changed as necessity required, keeping alive among themselves, their tribe, and their descendants the knowledge that these practices were required by the Lords, the Gods, then they would be saved from the degeneration of the cities (which they abhor and fear) and their children would be strong and healthy, and not become thieves and liars and murderers. This strength, this sanity, a bond with the sources of the knowledge of the Gods, would be maintained in them as long as they were prepared to do according to our wishes.
We renewed our instructions for safe and wise existence on Shikasta – moderation, abstention from luxury, plain living, care for others whom they must never exploit or oppress, the care for animals, and for the earth, and above all, a quiet attention to what is most needed from them, obedience. A readiness to hear our wishes.
And we told the most respected of the tribe, a male already old – in their terms – that in his veins ran the ‘blood of the Gods’, and his progeny would always remain close to the Gods, if they kept up the right ways.
We caused him to have two sons, both irradiated by Canopean vibrancies.
And we went back to the cities, to see if we could find any with enough individuals in them to make it possible to redeem them. None could be saved. In each were a few people who could hear us, and these we told to leave at once with any who would listen to them.
We returned to our old man among his flocks whose sons had by then been born, and told him that apart from his family, his tribe, and certain others, soon none would remain alive, for the cities would be destroyed, because of their wickedness. They had fallen victim to the enemies of the Lord, who at all times worked against the Lord to capture the hearts and minds of our creatures.
He pleaded with us.
Others of the few good people in the cities pleaded with us.
I do not wish to write further of this.
Having made sure of the safety of those who could be saved, we signalled to the space-fleet, and the cities were blasted into oblivion, all at the same time.
Deserts lie where these cities thrived.
The fertile, rich, teeming places, with the populous corrupt cities – all desert now, and the heat waves shimmer and sizzle, for there are no trees, no grass, no green.
And again I have seen all the animals rushing away, great herds of them, galloping and tossing their heads and crying out – running from the habitations of men.
History of Shikasta, VOL. 997, Period of the Public Cautioners. EXCERPTS FROM SUMMARY CHAPTER.
While we can date the end of this period exactly, to the year, it is not so easy to mark its beginning. For instance, do we class Taufiq and Johor as public warners? On every one of their visits they cautioned – or perhaps reminded is the better word – anybody who could hear what was being said to them. Visits of various sorts continued without intermission almost from the time of the retreat of the ice, and while most were ‘secret’ – meaning that the individuals contacted were not aware this person among them was from another star system – there was always, somewhere on Shikasta, an envoy or agent of some class or calibre at work quite openly, explaining, exhorting, reminding. So it can be said that Shikasta has always been provided with public advisers, except for a very short time indeed, 1,500 (their) years at the end.
But this volume covers that period from about a thousand years before the first destruction, the inundation, of the cities of the peculiarly well-favoured and advantaged area around and south of the Great Seas, until that date 1,500 years before the end. A close reading of the various available texts will make it clear why this time was considered by us as worth the continuous supply of our emissaries. It cannot be said that there had been a change of policy towards Shikasta – that can never, could not, be possible: our long-term policies remain intact. Nor can it be said that the general degeneration of the Shikastan stock or stocks was unforeseen. The difference between this period and others is rather in emphasis, in scale. When civilization after civilization, culture after culture, has had to be tolerated as long as was possible because of its low level of accomplishment (according to Canopean standards) and then either allowed to run down and vanish from the weight of its corruption, or be destroyed deliberately by us as a danger to the rest of Shikasta, to us, or to other Canopean colonies, when such a state of affairs has been reached, and on a large scale, over large parts of the central landmass, then this has to be thought of as different in kind and degree from one where sparse populations are widely spread, perhaps only just self-sufficient, where a single city whose main purpose was trade and not groups of cities in an imperial bond defined an area or areas, and where one or two of our agents could reach all the inhabitants of a large part of Shikasta simply by quite modest efforts in the course of a limited stay.
Over the many thousand years of the Period of the Exhorten or Cautioners we observe this series of events, constantly repeated:
It was observed by us, or reported to us, that the link between Canopus and Shikasta was weakening beyond safe levels.
This was followed by reports that a culture, a city, a tribe, or groups of individuals vital to our interests were falling away from what had been established as a bond.
It was urgently necessary to strengthen the link, the bond, by restoring selected individuals to suitable ways of life, thus regenerating and vitalizing areas, cultures, or cities.
We sent down a technician, or two, or several. It might happen that all but one or two would be working quietly, unknown to the populace.
This one would have to be born, through Zone Six, and bred in the ordinary way by suitable parents, in order that what was said by – usually – him could take effect.
A note on sexual choice. Of course developed individuals with us are androgynous, to put it into the nearest Shikastan terminology possible: we do not have emotional or physical or psychological characteristics that are considered as appertaining to one sex rather than another, as is normal on the more backward planets. There have been many of our envoys who have manifested as ‘female’, but since the time of the falling away of the Lock, before when males and females were equal everywhere on Shikasta and neither exploited the other, the females have been in subjection, and this has led to problems which on the whole are considered by our envoys as an unnecessary added difficulty to already difficult enough tasks. [See CHAPTER 9, this volume, ‘Manifestations of Envoys as Female for Local Cultural Purposes’.]
As our envoy or representative grew to maturity in the chosen culture, he, or she, would become notable for a certain level of perception and understanding demonstrated in conduct which was nearly always at odds with the local ideas and practices.
Those individuals who were drawn to our envoy, by liking, or – as often happened – first by antagonism overcome by a growth of understanding which became liking, formed a core or nucleus which could be used to strengthen and maintain the link, the bond.
In the earlier times, these individuals were often many, and could form quite strong subcultures of their own. Or, spread among whole populations, formed a strong enough yeast to raise the whole mass to standards of decent and wholesome living in conformity with the general needs of Canopus. Then, as time passed, because of the growth of populations everywhere, which meant always less of the substance-of-we-feeling to go around, and because of the always growing strength of Shammat, there were fewer and fewer individuals who could respond, or who, having responded initially, were able to maintain this response as a living and constantly renewed contact with us, with Canopus. In a city where the mass of the population had sunk to total self-interest, it was common that there might be one, or two, of our link-individuals, no more, desperately struggling to survive. Sometimes whole civilizations had none, had never had any, of this ‘yeast’; or, if our efforts had been successful in seeding a few, they were quickly driven out, or destroyed, or themselves succumbed from the weight of the pressures on them. Sometimes it was only in madhouses or as outcasts in the deserts that these valuable individuals could survive at all.
It has not been unknown for some of our own envoys, not more than a few, however, to fall victim of these pressures, either temporarily or permanently. In the latter case, they were subjected to long periods of rehabilitation on their return to Canopus, or sent to a suitable colonized planet to recover.
During the entire period under review, religions of any kind flourished. Those that concern us most here took their shape from the lives or verbal formulations of our envoys. This happened more often than not, and can be taken as a rule: every one of our public cautioners left behind a religion, or cult, and many of the unknown ones did, too.
These religions had two main aspects. The positive one, at their best: a stabilization of the culture, preventing the worst excesses of brutality, exploitation, and greed. The negative: a priesthood manipulating rules, regulations, with punitive inflexibility; sometimes allowing, or exacerbating, excesses of brutality, exploitation, and greed. These priesthoods distorted what was left of our envoys’ instruction, if it was understood by them at all, and created a self-perpetuating body of individuals totally identified with their invented ethics, rules, beliefs, and who were always the worst enemies of any envoys we sent.
These religions were a main difficulty in the way of maintaining Shikasta in our system.
They have often been willing agents of Shammat.
At no time during this period was it possible for an envoy to approach any part of Shikasta without having to outwit, stave off, or in some way make harmless, these representatives of ‘God’, ‘the Gods’, or whatever was the current formulation. Often our emissaries have been persecuted, or murdered, or worse – for everything of their instruction, vital and necessary to that particular place and time, was distorted. Very often the grip a ‘religion’ had on a culture, or even a whole continent, was so pervasive that our agents could make no impact there at all, but had to work elsewhere on Shikasta where conditions were less monolithic, perhaps even – according to current ideas – more primitive. Many times in the history of Shikasta our bond has been maintained by a culture or subculture considered contemptible by the ruling power, which was nearly always a combination of the military and a religion: the military using the priests, or the priests the military.
For long periods of the history of Shikasta we can sum up the real situation thus: that in such and such a place, a few hundred, or even a handful, of individuals, were able with immense difficulty to adapt their lives to Canopean requirements, and thus saved the future of Shikasta.
The longer this process continued, the harder it was for our agents to make their way through the meshes of the emotional and intellectual formulations originating from former visitors. Shikasta was an olla podrida of cults, beliefs, religions, creeds, convictions; there was no end to them, and each of our envoys had to take into account the fact that even before he, she, was dead, his instruction would have already taken flight into fantasy, or been hardened into dogma: each knew that this newly minted, fresh, flexible method, adapted for that particular phase, would, before he had finished his work, have been captured by the Shikastan Law, and become mechanical, useless. She, he, would be working against not only a thousand past frozen formulations, but his own … An envoy put it like this: it was as if he were running a race at the top of his speed, to keep ahead of his own words and actions springing up just behind him, and turning into enemies – what had been alive and functional a few minutes ago was already dead and used by the dead. By the representatives and captives of Shammat who, in this particular epoch, brought itself to a height of beastliness, of effective destructiveness, and almost entirely on what was channelled off from Shikasta. Shammat representatives were always on Shikasta, just as ours were. Shammat captured whole cultures, civilizations, so that they were never anything but out of our reach. Shammat was, from its own point of view, an entirely successful colonizer of Shikasta. But never entirely, never totally. This was not possible.
The major religions of the last days were all founded by Grade I emissaries. The last of these religions remained somewhat less riven and sectarian than the others. It was on its popular level a simple, emotional religion, and its basis was a scripture whose lowest reach of understanding – the level on which the religion was stabilized – was all threats and promises, for this was all that Shikastans by now could respond to. By then, very few of them could respond to anything, except in terms of personal gain, or loss. Or, if such individuals by prolonged and painstaking contact and instruction did learn that what was needed from her, him, was not on the level of gain or loss, then this had to be at a later stage, for the early stages of attraction to Canopean influences were always seen as everything was seen on Shikasta by then: something given, bestowed.
For Duty, in that last time, was all but forgotten. What Duty was, was not known. That something was Due, by them, was strange, inconceivable news they could not take in, absorb. They were set only for taking. Or for being given. They were all open mouths and hands held out for gifts – Shammat! All grab and grasp – Shammat! Shammat!
Whereas, in the early days of the post-disaster time, it had sometimes been enough for one of us to enter a village, a settlement, and sit down and talk to them of their past, of what they had been, of what they would one day become, but only through their own efforts and diligence – that they had dues to pay to Canopus who had bred them, would sustain them through their long dark time, was protecting them against Shammat, that they had in them a substance not Shikastan, and which would one day redeem them – told this, it was often enough, and they would set themselves to adapt to the current necessities.
But this became less and less what we could expect. Towards the end one of our agents would begin work knowing that it might take not a day, or a month, or a year, but perhaps all his life to stabilize a few individuals, so that they could listen.
Records, and reports and memoirs from our messengers show always harder and more painful effort put into less and less return.
Handfuls of individuals rescued from forgetfulness were the harvest for the efforts of dozens of our missionaries, of all grades, kinds, and degrees of experience on a dozen planets. These handfuls, these few, were enough to keep the link, the bond. But at what a cost!
How much has Shikasta cost Canopus, always!
How often have our envoys returned from a term of duty on Shikasta, amazed at what the link depended on; appalled at what they had seen.
It has to be recorded that more than once discussions have been held on whether Shikasta was worth the effort. A full-scale conference, involving all Canopus and our colonies, argued the question. There grew up a body of opinion, which remained a minority, that Shikasta should be jettisoned. This is why Shikasta is in a unique position among the colonized planets: service there is voluntary, except for those individuals who have been concerned with it from the beginning.
JOHOR reports:
This is the requested report on individuals who, if Taufiq had not been captured, would have been in very different situations, and on events that would have been differently aligned. I shall not always amplify, or sometimes even mention, the exact role that John Brent-Oxford might have played.
To contact them I entered Shikasta from Zone Six, at various points, but making use mostly of the Giants’ habitat.
INDIVIDUAL ONE
Although she was born in a country of ample skies and capacious landscapes, she was afflicted, and from her earliest years, with feelings of being confined. It seemed to her that she ought to be able to find within herself memories of some larger experience, deeper skies. But she did not possess these memories. The society around her seemed petty, piffling, to the point of caricature. As a child she could not believe that the adults were serious in the games they played. Everything done and said seemed a repetition, or a recycling, as if they were puppets in a play being staged over and over again. Afflicted by an enormous claustrophobia, she refused all the normal developments possible to her, and as soon as she was self-supporting left her family and that society. How she earned her living was of no importance to her. She went to another city in the same continent, but there everything seemed the same. Not only identical patterns of thought and behaviour, but the people she met tended to be friends or relatives of those she had left. She moved to another city, another – and then to a different continent. While there was a general conspiracy – so it seemed to her – to agree that this culture was different from the one she had left in ways meriting a thousand books and treatises political, psychological, economic, sociological, philosophical, and religious – on the contrary, to her it seemed the same. A different language, or languages. Slightly more generous in one way – how women were treated, for instance. Worse in another: children had a bad time of it. Animals respected here but not there – and so on. But the patterns of human bondage – which was how she saw it – did not seem to vary much. And, no matter where she travelled, she met no new people. This man encountered in an improbable situation – by chance in a laundrette or at a bus stop – would turn out to be a relation of an acquaintance in another city, or a friend of a family she had known as a child. She left again, choosing an ‘old’ society – which was how Shikastans would see it – more complex, textured, various, than those she had known. Again, differences were emphasized where she could see only resemblances. She earned her living as she could, in ways that could not bind her, would not marry, and had three abortions, because the men did not seem to her to be originally enough minted from the human stock to make their progeny worthwhile. And she could not meet new, different people. She understood she was in, or on, some invisible mesh or template, envisioned by her in bad black moods as a vast spider web, where all people and events were interconnected, and nothing she could do, ever, would free her. And never could she say anything of what she felt, for she would not be understood. What she saw, others did not. What she heard, they could not.
She was in a certain country in the Northwest fringes. It occurred to her that this move of hers, to this country, which had cost her, so she had imagined, a good deal of effort in the way of choosing right, this great self-transportation, had not been her will at all: it was her father’s. He had always wanted, so she now recalled, to live in this particular city, this country, and in a certain way. While she had not duplicated his dreamed-of way of life – for it had become obsolete – she was living a contemporary equivalence. Shortly after this discovery, she found herself outside a door in a street she had never been in before, to visit a doctor, and remembered that the address was one an aunt had lived in: she had written letters here from her home country.
She left again, for the extreme north of the Isolated Northern Continent. She was in a small town, which for most of the year was under snow. No one came there for pleasure. It was a working town, and she had a job in a shop that sold goods to trappers and what Indians still remained. She could not have found for herself a situation more at odds with anything her parents or her background might have foreseen for her. Then into the shop came a man she knew. He was a doctor last seen in her hometown, fifteen years before. They had been linked briefly by an impersonal pairing bond typical of that time.
She fled back to the Northwest fringes. She was in the heart of a great sprawling unshaped city of several million inhabitants and, getting off a bus on an impulse and entering a little restaurant for a cup of tea, she sensed something familiar. She was greeted by a girl working as a waitress: she was the sister of the doctor.
The world had finally snapped around her like a handcuff. She screamed, leaped up, broke crockery and overturned tables.
The police came. She was taken to hospital. About whether she was mad or not, the doctors could not agree; and the restaurant brought a charge against her. But the lawyer who would have been the right one for this task was not there. If he had been, the case could have reached far beyond its beginnings, and influenced events, people …
She was kept in hospital for longer than she felt was warranted, things dawdled and delayed. She was at last fined in court, which some kindly person paid for her. She was set free and felt that she was in a prison worse than any human being could devise.
If John (or Taufiq) had defended her, he would have been able to influence her to sit still at last and allow herself to see what it was that imprisoned her.
I arranged an alternative, a temporary attack of paralysis, diagnosed as hysterical.
Unable to take flight, she struggled inwardly for a time, and then, exactly as a cornered hawk sinks down among his fluffing and awkwardly extended feathers, bright eyes staring at her assailant, so she, too, learned to gaze steadily into what frightened her most.
INDIVIDUAL TWO
Standardization of intellectual and emotional patterns had become extreme. A main mechanism for achieving this was a device that supplied identical indoctrinational material simultaneously into every living or working unit, whether that of a single person, a family, or an institution, through a whole country. These programmes were standardized, particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic – kindness to animals, for instance – but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition.
Ventriloquism was popular. A person with a bland and conforming appearance and personality developed a subsidiary personality and presented it as ventriloquist’s dummy. This other personality could be of their own species, or variations on the animal theme. A popular one was a canine, endearing in appearance, who was clever in methods of successful dishonesty. In every episode of his story this animal stole, lied, and cheated, was able always to cover up after a failure, to deceive and boast and flatter and manipulate. It was also inordinately greedy for food. This creature was no major criminal or monster, only a small-scale trickster and, if you accepted the premise, it was quite funny. Of course, it was possible to find it humorous at all only in times of almost total corruption.
Children were identified with these ‘unreal’ figures, which could never be taken for anything but dolls, or puppets, and which were particularly useful to take as secondary selves, simply because they did not demand the levels of self-criticism which would be demanded by creatures like themselves, who were ‘real’.
A certain group of children, much neglected by parents, who were all working, and who left them almost entirely to themselves, developed a private world in which each one of them was this puppet, the half-grown dog with a typically flattering name, Crafty Collie. These children lived more and more inside the world they had created, taking, like their exemplar, to small ways of trickery, cheating, and lying – this in a motivated, patterned way, for all they had to do every afternoon was to press a button in order to see a programme for their alternative selves to follow. They took to more intricate crimes. Soon they had a leader. She was female, a bright resourceful child of eleven years. She it was who kept them together, who made sure they watched the succeeding episodes of the ventriloquist’s dramas, and who translated into action the messages of Crafty Collie. This went on for three years, while the children became young adults, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Their crimes, at this time when nearly everybody engaged in some form of cheating or stealing, were not remarkable. They stole from shops, broke into houses, kept themselves supplied with money and goods. After every escapade, the group would gather in a ritual where what they had done was played out in terms of their pattern.
In the course of breaking into a house a murder was committed, almost accidentally, certainly without any sense of it mattering.
They were caught, and details of the cult were made public. Photographs of these young criminals, and of the room they used – in an empty house, decorated with pictures and models of Crafty Collie – were reproduced everywhere. When the doctors and psychiatrists examined the youngsters, it was found that their identification with the puppet was not affecting them more than half the time, for each had an ordinary personality, with its aims, beliefs, and standards, quite different from the other personality, which was a group one.
It was the girl who pointed out that only a month before Crafty Collie had been shown as tormenting and teasing a crazy old woman before knocking her down and leaving her apparently unconscious, reproved of course by his creator or other self, who always played the – ineffective – role of conscience to this secondary personality’s excesses. Or successes.
The whole gang was tried, in a way not used before at that particular time, in an exemplary way: for child crime had become so prevalent that people were becoming more afraid of children than they were of adults.
The girl was in a special position as self-confessed, or self-proclaimed leader, for she was proud of her role as mother of this gang.
If Taufiq had been where he ought to have been, his role was to defend these children as victims of indoctrination. Whether this indoctrination was deliberate on the part of the authorities, or the result of ignorance, was not, could not be – he would have argued – any concern of the children, who had to suffer the consequences. In other words Taufiq, John, would have inspired a public campaign to get an extraordinarily lax and indifferent public to recognize where, when, and how the most sophisticated indoctrinational methods ever devised were being used on a population captive to them.
Further, if Taufiq had been able to fit into these events, his particular personality would have influenced these young people in ways not otherwise attainable. All had been neglected, none had been given any exemplar of worth to identify with. He would have been able to direct them in ways that would lead to their eventually gaining enough inner freedom to make real choices about what their lives would be.
But now, what one individual could have accomplished must be spread among several. I arranged that a group of lawyers not previously inspired to work of public responsibility take this case: they could be expected to do something at least of what was needed. As for influencing the youngsters, I saw to it that each one would come into contact with those who could help them, to some extent: a child-care officer with certain characteristics, a warder – three were sent to prison – a doctor, social workers.
The task with these young people took much longer than I expected or had planned for. It was not the most successful of my endeavours. The girl was not able to recover from a sojourn in prison calculated only to harden and deform: she came out a real criminal, soon made an emotional transfer to one of the extreme political sects which flourished then, and was killed in an exploit that could be characterized as part terrorist and part for gain. She was not twenty years old. Her rehabilitation had therefore to be reserved until after her entry into Zone Six.
INDIVIDUAL THREE (Workers’ Leader)
A common type throughout the Century of Destruction in all parts of Shikasta, but the variation I am reporting on here was produced by the Northwest fringes and played a key part in the social structure. It was a stabilizing one, and that this was so was felt by many as a bitter paradox, since their ideological birth was nearly always in the philosophy of transforming society completely, quickly, and into a sort of ‘paradise’ not uninfluenced by the local ‘sacred’ literature.
This individual was born into the chaotic conditions intensified by World War I. There was a small class living in affluence, but the bulk of the population was in poverty. He was an infant, a child, and then a young adult, among people who never had enough to eat, were cold, ill-housed, and often out of work. Of his immediate family three died of illnesses due to malnutrition. His mother was worn out by work and ill-feeling before she was thirty.
He lived, from the moment he came to consciousness of his situation, and that was early, in a state of anguished incredulity about the hardships of the people around him. This undersized urchin would wander the streets, upheld through cold, hunger, and the bitterness of injustice by visions and dreams. Each man or woman or shrunken child he passed seemed to him to have a double, another alternate being … what could be, what could have been … He would gaze, exalted, into the face of one, and address him silently: ‘You poor exhausted thing, you could be anything, it is not your fault …’ He would watch his sister, a girl exhausted with anaemia who had been working since she was fourteen, with no hope for anything but a future as narrow as her mother’s, and he would be saying to her inwardly, ‘You don’t know what you are, what you could be’ – and it was as if he had put his arms around not only her, but the poor and the suffering everywhere. He cherished the twisted and the deformed with his gaze, he sustained the hungry and the desperate as he whispered, ‘You have it in you to be a marvel! Yes, you are a marvel and a wonder and you don’t know it!’ And he was making promises, fierce inward vows, to himself, and to them.
He simply could not believe that this extreme of deprivation was possible in a country – he saw the problem in terms of his own country, even his own town, for ‘the world’ to him was names in newspapers – that described itself as rich, and headed a world empire.
He was informed beyond most of his fellows, because his father was a workers’ representative, insofar as his hard life allowed him time and energy to be. There were books in his home, and ideas apart from those to do with the struggle to feed and clothe his family.
He was in the army five years, in World War II. His predominant emotion of marvelling incredulity that people could inflict such suffering on others, changed. He was no longer incredulous: as a soldier he travelled widely, and he saw the conditions of his upbringing everywhere. The war taught him to think in terms of Shikasta as a whole, and of interacting forces, at least to an extent: he was not able to encompass the dark-skinned in his compassion, not able to withstand the influences of his upbringing which had taught him to think of himself as superior. But he was also being affected, like everybody in or out of the army, by the general brutalizing, coarsening. He accepted things as ‘human nature’ which as a child he would have rejected. But he was full of purpose, dreaming of returning home to uplift others, rescuing, supporting, shielding them from realities which he felt himself able to withstand, though they could not.
When he got home from the army, he set himself actively to ‘speak for the working class’, as the phrase then went, and he very soon stood out among others.
The period immediately following World War II was bitter, impoverished, grey, colourless. The nations of the Northwest fringes had shattered themselves, physically and morally. [See History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III. SUMMARY CHAPTER.] The Isolated Northern Continent had strengthened itself and was supporting the nations of the Northwest fringes on condition they become subservient and obedient allies in the military bloc this continent dominated. Wealth flowed from the military bloc into the Northwest fringes, and about fifteen years after the end of World War II there was a sudden brief prosperity all over the area. That was a paradoxical thing, in a paradoxical time, and deeply demoralizing to populations already demoralized and lacking in purpose.
The system of economic production depended on consumption of every conceivable kind of goods by everyone – consumption of entirely unnecessary objects, food, drink, clothes, gadgets, devices. Every person in the Northwest fringes – as in the Isolated Northern Continent – was subjected, every moment of every day, through propaganda methods more powerful than any ever known before, to the need to buy, consume, waste, destroy, throw away – and this at a time when the globe as a whole was already short of goods of every kind and the majority of Shikasta’s people starved and went without.
The individual under consideration here was at the age of forty an influential person in a workers’ organization.
His role was to prevent the people he represented from being paid less than they could live on decently – this was a minimum goal; otherwise to get them ‘as large a slice of the cake as possible’; otherwise – but this aim had long since been secondary to the others – to overturn the economic system and substitute a workers’ rule. He often contrasted how he saw things now with how he had seen them when he was a child and streets, areas of streets, no, whole cities, hungered and dwindled. This spurt of quite spurious and baseless affluence so soon to end, was intoxicating. Suddenly everything seemed possible. Within reach were experiences, ways of living he had never dreamed of as available to people of his kind. Not ‘a decent living wage’, which slogan now seemed to him mean-spirited and cowardly, but as much as could be got. And this attitude was reinforced all the time, by everything around him. It was not that the working classes got anything like what the rich still got, but that millions were getting more than had seemed possible without some shocking overturn of society, or a revolution … in this atmosphere where there seemed no limit to what could be expected, there seemed no reason either why the workers of the nation should not exact retribution for the poverty of their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents, for the humiliations of their own childhoods. Revenge was a motive, clear to everyone to see.
But it was not in the nature of things that the Age of Affluence could continue: and the reasons were not to be sought in local conditions but globally – so far our friend did understand. He was still one who examined events less narrowly than most. He remained solitary. He was referred to as ‘an odd man out’. Where groups of people are close, kept together by forces they combat by being defensive, the characteristics of individuals become affectionately regarded, are prized, made much of.
He was admired for standing for minority points of view. For being quiet, observant, reflective, often critical.
This was his role.
He had integrity.
He was proud of this, was still proud, but now saw that such words can acquire a double edge. He noted that people were very ready to congratulate him on this integrity of his. He had seen that people are willing to compliment others in the way these want to be complimented: an exacted flattery.
