timeflies notes

Notes from Sadler podcast ep - “The Present Generation and Work of the Spirit”

“Only those who do the work get the bread” - not true of material life, of wealth and resources. But it is true in one area - human spirit. Tapping into the human spirit. No matter where you come from; you have to work to get this, and anyone can get it.

Ahuh...

They cut back very hard indeed, but to a minimum beneath which they would not go; they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-technological tribalism. They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism. They built the roads first, the houses second.

Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.

None of these off worlders can follow our physics. The Hainish call it materialism, and the Terrans call it mysticism, and then they both give up.

In the early years of the Settlement we were aware of that, on the lookout for it. People discriminated very carefully then between administering things and governing people. They did it so well that we forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody’s born an Odonian any more than he’s born civilized!

“We’re products of the same great revolutionary movement of the eighth century—we’re socialists, like you.” 

“But you are archists. The State of Thu is even more centralized than the State of A-Io. One power structure controls all, the government, administration, police, army, education, laws, trades, manufactures. And you have the money economy.” 

“A money economy based on the principle that each worker is paid as he deserves, for the value of his labor—not by capitalists whom he’s forced to serve, but by the state of which he’s a member!” 

“Does he establish the value of his own labor?” 

“Why don’t you come to Thu and see how real socialism functions?” 

“I know how real socialism functions,” Shevek said. “I could tell you, but would your government let me explain it, in Thu?”