I’ve just finished re-reading Out on Blue Six, by Ian McDonald, which presents us with McDonald’s take on 1984: the Benevolent Society, in which everyone is happy – or else. People are assigned to the job which will make them happiest, matched with their perfectly compatible life companion, and placed into the caste which best suits their psychological makeup. Causing pain, physical OR emotional, is a crime – a paincrime – which in standard Orwellian fashion is policed by the Ministry of Love.
However, as with most dystopias, the Benevolent Society is flawed. The job which is guaranteed to make you happy may not be the job you have wanted with all your heart for as long as you can remember, something which may challenge and frustrate you, but which fulfills your dreams. Perfect compatibility does not equal love. Children are separated from parents in the interests of caste divisions, never to see each other again. And a society without any kind of pain is a society without empathy, without sacrifice, without progress.
At the end of the novel, the godlike, all-powerful AIs that rule the world award complete control over the Benevolent Society to a ragtag band of artistic rebels, and they begin the slow process of returning some disorder and unpredictability to the world, making it better by making it worse.
So here’s your challenge for the day. I’m going to wave my magic wand, or anoint you, or pull your number out of a very large hat. You, YOU, are the unchallenged ruler of the world. Your authority is complete, although it is not magical. You cannot repeal the law of gravity* or make time run backward. If you decide that you want a one-inch deep trench that stretches along the entire U.S. Canada border, resources must be assembled, funds allocated, people hired. (Training is probably minimal, although you never know.)
What would you do?
Given the nature of, well, human nature, there will probably be some moments of excess, as per Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty. But once those initial moments of self-indulgence were out of the way, imagine the possibilities!
The entire military budget of the United States could be reassigned to solving the problems of cancer and AIDS. The massive political structures of the Western world, the congresses and parliaments, rationalized and reduced and the excess capital reassigned to free health care and free education.
However, here's the real question. As above, your legislative control is universal, but you can't perform magic. How many of the conflicts and struggles currently plaguing the world are the result of cultural and religious differences that you couldn't just tell to go away? Would a law against war actually stop wars? Hmmm....maybe we do need to keep some of the soldiers....and there's the beginning of the end. Damn, it looked so promising there for a minute.
Oh well, we can always try again.
So here’s your challenge for the day. I’m going to wave my magic wand, or anoint you, or pull your number out of a very large hat. You, YOU, are the unchallenged ruler of the world...
- Sid
* There's an H.G. Wells short story entitled The Man Who Could Work Miracles which accurately addresses the difficulties of possessing ultimate power without a clear understanding of physics.
Truthfully what would I do? My answer is too controversial and politically incorrect to post. My second choice of answer would be as follows: to make pollution and littering a fine-heavy crime, to make recycling mandatory in manufacturing and at a personal use level, to ban smoking (people could take nicotine pills instead), capital punishment for serial killers and pedophiles, to make yoga a part of mandatory physical education in schools, free bicycles for everyone, and to give tax breaks for regularly-used gym memberships and other healthy behaviours. Ultimately I'd be aiming for a healthy, interpersonally respectful, ecologically minded society.
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