No spoilers here, so the only context I'll give is that an old man who is in a position of authority is speaking to a young man who is on the cusp of entering into the lower regions of that authority's structure, and the young man says this:
"...no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery."
I immediately had a flashback to George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (I can't find the exact quote, but it was something on the order of "You are able to live in comfort because a group of coal miners work in conditions which are miserable and dangerous".) And I also started thinking about the whole Structure of Society thing. Orwell talked about it in several of his books...the good old pyramid scheme where a small group--say 10 to 15%--was at the top, there was a thin layer of "outer party" folks, and then there was a majority of people who were basically cannon fodder. If you ship that bit of Orwell with the aforementioned bit of Asimov, you get a rather strange idea: society's stability is dependent on the "cannon fodder." But that doesn't make any sense, does it?
Well...let's pretend that it does for a minute and work from there. And let's throw a little Alexis de Tocqueville into the mix. He said that
"When a workman has spent a considerable portion of his existence in this manner, his thoughts are forever set upon the object of his daily toil; his body has contracted certain fixed habits, which it can never shake off: in a word, he no longer belongs to himself, but to the calling which he has chosen. It is in vain that laws and manners have been at the pains to level all barriers round such a man, and to open to him on every side a thousand different paths to fortune; a theory of manufactures more powerful than manners and laws binds him to a craft, and frequently to a spot, which he cannot leave: it assigns to him a certain place in society, beyond which he cannot go: in the midst of universal movement it has rendered him stationary."
That sounds pretty fucking stable, doesn't it? And if "the workman" can be counted on to keep in his place...I suppose that there are several benefits which accrue from that. First off, the dirty work gets done. Second off, those workmen can be exploited in several significant ways: tax revenues and purchasing power. If you create a society in which people "need" a car (car insurance, gasoline, repairs, etc.), a house, some booze to numb the pain, etc. ...then you have some serious money coming your way. Even better, if you put some of these items just a bit out of their reach, you can get them to go into debt and pay for loans for all kinds of things.
Oh, man. I guess the cannon fodder is the stable part of society, isn't it?
It's funny (but not ha ha funny)--this wasn't what I intended to write about at all. I thought I was going to write another Asimov Knows Trump thing. But that's the thing about writing. It seems to tap into a part of your brain that gets you to think about things in a different way. At least for me. So writing takes me places that talking or thinking wouldn't take me.
Which is why I do this blog, I suppose.
So...thanks for being witnesses to that.
“We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
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