Baumer sighed. “I came here to get away from a world that has
been left spiritually devastated by its infatuation with bourgeois trivia and mindless distractions. The banks and the corporations own everybody now, and the qualities that they reward are the ones that suit their needs: loyalty and obedience. And the cattle are content, grazing in the field. Nobody wants to think about what it’s doing to them, or where it’s all leading. They don’t want to think at all. It’s gone too far now for anything to change. But here, on Jevien, there’s been a forced stop to the lunacy, a reexamination of everything. With the right people of vision in control, it could turn out different.”
“You really think so?” Gina’s tone suggested that it all sounded too good to be true.
“Why not? The Jevlenese are human, too, made of the same clay. They can he molded.”
“How would you make it different, if you could?” Gina asked.
That got him talking.
What Jevlen needed was for the anarchy that was the cause of all its problems to be replaced by centralized direction of the planet’s affairs, with tighter control over all aspects of existence. The way to achieve that was through a dizzying system of government programs and agencies. And the chance was there now, because the first step to putting the machinery in place had already been achieved with the setting up of the Ganymean planetary administration.
“But that’s not the way Ganymeans seem to think,~’ Gina pointed out.
“And look at the mess they’ve made. They don’t understand human needs. They must be made to understand.”
Approved goods and services, along with desirable levels for their consumption, should be determined by regional planning boards, and industry limited to the minimum necessary to provide them—thus eliminating any need for a wasteful competitive business sector. Occupations should be assigned on the basis of society’s needs, balanced against aptitude scores accumulated during “social conditioning’ ‘—the term that Baumer used for education—although he was prepared to concede that due consideration could be given to individual preference if circumstances permitted. Access to entertainment and leisure activities should be rationed into a reward system to facilitate the achievement of quotas.
However, although she stayed for another forty minutes, it was all pretty much in keeping with the picture that Gina had already formed, and she learned little that was new.
Baumer saw himself as one of those outcasts from the herd, set apart in the company of those such as van Gogh, Nietzsche, Lawrence, and Nijinsky, by the sensitivity of seeing too much and too deep. Everybody was born with the mystical spark dormant within them, but its potential was quenched by the modern world’s delusions of objectivity and rationality. Preoccupation with the external, and the false elevation of science as the way to find knowledge and salvation, had diverted humanity from the inner paths that mattered. He particularly detested the general adulation accorded to the “practical.” Aristophanes had ridiculed Socrates, and Blake had hated Newton for the same reason.
Nevertheless, despite Gina’s hope that she might have made some indent, he sidestepped another attempt by her to extend their relationship socially. She eventually left without obtaining any commitment for them to talk again, or any feeling that she had achieved very much.
Thinking through the discussion on her way back to PAC, she felt grubby at the deception that she had lent herself to. Behind its facade of indignation and righteousness, the line she had forced herself to listen to was, like so many philosophies that she had heard from other misfits and self—styled iconoclasts, really nothing more than a massive exercise in self-justification. Because they didn’t fit, the world would have to be changed.
In contrast, there were people—Hunt, for instance-whom she classed as shapers of the world. They didn’t pass judgments on it, but found niches that fitted them because they could come to terms with the reality they saw and make the best of the chances it offered. They could look the inevitability of death in the face, accept their own insignificance, and gain satisfaction from finding something useful to do in spite of it. The Baumers of life couldn’t, and that was what they resented. Unable to achieve anything meaningful themselves, they gained satisfaction from showing that nothing anyone else achieved could have meaning.