Penthesilea
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Re: On My Journey
Reply #534 - Dec 1st, 2009 at 8:14pm
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I've been re-reading sections of Stranger in a Strange Land and thinking about The Church of All Worlds. The original copyright is 1961 and it was written from the perspective of the mid to late 1950s. Heinlein was a brilliant and insightful writer but he failed to see how the world would change in the coming decade, influenced in part by his own work, and consequently some of the assumptions the book is based on no longer apply while some of the societal changes he envisioned as coming by virtue of the influence of "the Man from Mars" have come to pass. The concept of "growing closer" through sexual contact is a growing part of our culture as the "free love" of the "Unruly 60s" has evolved into the practice of polyamory. The practice isn't as "formalized" as a Nest but in the essential aspects, it is the same. Female fertility, at least in the West, is controlled by the woman herself thanks to the widespread use of the various forms of birth control. There are still far too many political and religious busybodies interfering with that but the genie is out of that particular bottle and getting it back in is a lost cause. Some things about the emerging society that Heinlein envisioned have not come to pass and aren't likely too given the way that reality is currently configured. Without the transformational affects of learning the Martian language, which was the method by which Heinlein began the transformation of the society in his book, the essential trust and honesty between "water brothers" is impossible to achieve reliably. Which is why, sadly, the real life Church of All Worlds is doomed to repeated failure. In the book, members of a Nest shared everything in a pure "communist" state. Everyone contributed to the best of their ability and took only what they needed when they needed it with the absolute knowledge that whatever they needed, physical, emotional or material, would be provided by their water brothers in the Nest and, if needed, the water brothers of other Nests since they were all connected in water brotherhood. As history has shown us, communism does not work on that large a scale and without "the Discipline" that was imparted by learning Martian, that will continue to be the case. When everyone owns everything, there will be those that give their all, taking only what they need and those who give as little as possible while taking as much as they can. And, because of the way that property/assets must be held and managed according to our legal system, it is entirely too easy for greedy individuals to gain control of everything, leaving their "water brothers" with nothing, especially if those water brothers put all their assets into the common holding. The Church of All Worlds is a beautiful concept but until the organizers find a way to either weed out the dishonest and greedy or human nature as we have known it changes attempts to create it in real life will fail. Perhaps the best thing that the individual can do is study the core concepts presented, "internalize" them and then live them as best one can in a world where "water brotherhood" is, still, an alien concept.
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On My Journey (Read 52540 times)
