As you guys know, this last weekend I was attending a seminar here in town.  One of the presentations (which I’d got to audit last year and already knew was great) was James Owen’s Drawing Out the Dragons – go look look, for the book and/or CD which I understand is a close approximation to being there in person.

I think it’s great and inspirational and I wish I’d got it thirty years ago, when we didn’t have dependents (other than the cats) and when – frankly – we were afraid of our own breath which is why I’d write novels and spend years not sending them out.  (Okay, we also didn’t have money for postage, but we could have sold something.  (Not one of the cats, though.  No one would buy them.))  If you’re relatively young (younger than I) you definitely want to buy the book/CD and go through it.  It might be the kick in the pants you need.

Keep in mind, though, that you’re not him.  Take a sane and rational assessment of your drive, your qualifications and your need to do whatever you really want to do (writing, cooking, painting or playing piano) instead of what you’re doing.

I am aware of my own limitations and my own internal issues.  Just listening to this doesn’t turn me into J. K. Rowling – by which I don’t mean the writing itself (yes, she is a good writer, but she also hit at the right time, in the right place, and I might be as good as she was and as lucky as she was at some point.)  I mean that if I were a single mother, on public assistance, even if I weren’t so poor that I couldn’t afford heating, the paranoid side of my brain would lock the writing down absolutely tight, and I’d be getting a minimum wage job, just to bring in some money and set my foot on a ladder.  I know I have the crazy paranoid person inside my head who spends most of her time locking my writing down tight (which is why I hate being on contract.  As deadline approaches, and then after the deadline passes which is worse, I spend more time being paranoid than writing. – After I deliver these two contracts, I’m going to try to send Baen a book every six months, on spec, so I don’t have to be under contract, which is a serious psychological problem.)

Okay – let me backtrack – James Owen’s presentation is about having the courage to let go of your stupid, go-nowhere “safe career” to do what you really want to do.  He says, right at the beginning “If you want to do something, no one can stop you from it.  If you don’t want to do it, no one can help you.”

You should listen to it, and consider his point, but you should also consider who you are.  For instance, I wish I’d listened to this 20 years ago, so I’d have had the focus to work without the near death experience, and even more importantly, to have more focus for the last twenty or thirty years.

Near death experience?

We were talking about this session – my husband and I – and we went back to the fact that part of the effect of the presentation was achieved for me when I was 33 and I found myself on my back, in an hospital bed, with pneumonia, and thinking I was going to die.  Or rather the doctors thought so.

I had a kid who was 5 and one who was a year and a half, and I thought I was going to die.  There was the usual issue when you have children that age.  I worried about my husband and my children, of course; I worried about who would look after my kids when Dan was working.

But what surprised me – shocked me to the core – is that I was guilty and worried about the books I’d never written.

Now, yes, I’ll probably die with books unwritten, but all of my worlds were dying with me.  One of the worlds was one I had had since I was fourteen – and when I died all of those characters would also die. (Part of the conversation this morning is that this world will have to be written.  And those of you who know exactly what I’m talking about, yes, what I mean is that world, and yes, it will be a pen name.  Closed.  But wouldn’t it be hilarious if that is the series that takes off.  It will be written, as time permits.  It will have to be published indie.  This is for my own conscience.  The rest is not important.)

When I actually recovered (and that’s a story in itself and not here) and went home, even before the year of recovery passed and I was fully recovered, changes were made.  That illness is part of the reason my children went to kindergarten and later to public school – so mommy had writing time.  They were still getting taught at home after school.  And yes, if I had the time again, I’d homeschool and write while the kids were working.  When forced I found out later on that I could do that.  But that’s besides the point.

I’d been writing before I almost died.  In fact, I had been part of a writing group, and I thought I was serious about my writing.  But in fact, I only sent a short story out a year or so, and though I was working on my writing everything else took priority.

After I came out of the hospital, even in my lowest-fiction-writing year (aka 2013), I’ve never written fewer than two novels and several short stories a year, and I sent them out, and I started seriously applying my time and effort to getting things published.

Because if I went back to the hospital, I didn’t want to be lying there and knowing there were worlds that lived only in my head and were dying with me.  I didn’t want that guilt.

That alone was enough to seriously focus me, though I had distractions – still do – and last year I got sucked into a whirlpool called non-fiction writing and consecutive illnesses, and finally had to step back, take a hard look and realize I couldn’t go on with that and is it what I really wanted to do?  (Yes, I’ll still be writing for PJM, but we’ve arranged things differently, and I’ll be writing less and have only one deadline for four posts a month.)

That is what a near fatal illness will cause you to do.  And I think it’s possible that Drawing Out Dragons will perhaps give you the same drive, the same focus (or close enough) without a near fatal illness.  (I get no portion of these sales, so if you can sit down and do this calculation yourself, do it.)

But think about it.  If you find yourself in bed, dying tomorrow, what would weigh on your conscience?

If you find yourself regretting that you spent so much time writing and so little playing with your kids or holding hands with your spouse, for the love of G-d, stop writing now and go do that stuff.

No.  Wait let me explain.  You’ll always feel a certain regret on those things.  When I get to take a walk with my husband, and spend the whole afternoon just the two of us, I treasure those days – or weekends.  Yes, the canoodling ones – and would like to do a lot more it.  And the other day I found myself crying into a box of pictures of the kids when they were little, because you can never hug them or play with them enough.  (They’re wonderful kids now, but they’re really not kids anymore, since both are legal adults and the older is the age I got married at. I miss my littles.  And no, I didn’t hug them enough.)  But this is the stuff you never do “enough.”

The question is do you regret that MORE than you regret not having published those worlds that have haunted you since the age of six?  If so, just go and play with your kids now, and devote ten years being a mom/dad or wife/husband.  Later, when the kids move out, revisit this question.

On the other hand, if, as with me, you feel bad about the times not taken to cuddle the kids, but what you REALLY mind is all those worlds – find a way to be serious about writing.

No, seriously.  Find a way.  Remember who you are.  Quitting your job might only make you neurotic and lock down your writing.  So you might want to keep a job, keep a safety net, whatever.  And yeah, you might still want to take time to spend with the kids and the husband – but put in two hours a day (say) hard and fast so you can write.  Or whatever it is you really want to do.

Because few of us (ah!) come back from their death beds.  And you might not have a second chance.  And waiting for the miracle when everything is perfect for your great work, just means it will never get done.

*Cedar Sanderson is a “raiding party member” that is my four friends who guest blog on rotating Mondays so I can have more time to write (yay.)*

Eating the Apocalypse — by Cedar Sanderson

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — has been removed.  I do promise to go through the copyedits as soon as humanly possible and send the advance copies to those who pre-ordered.  You’ll know when that’s eminent because I’ll remove scattered chapters from this blog.  I do hope to manage it next week, but I’m not promising as I’m still finishing a novel under contract to Baen. Meanwhile, if you donate $6 and note it in the field, you’ll get advance-subscribed to this novel.  I do, however, understand it can be a long time to wait, and if you want to, do so.  I will continue to post chapters here, roughly one a week.

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

Lady Helen Blythe, Sister of the Earl of Savage

I’m not as innocent as I look.  No, wait.  In many ways I’m far more innocent than I look, since I have it on good authority that I look like my brother Jon.  But I’m not so innocent that I didn’t know our oh, so helpful friend was the god Hermes, and that I didn’t know the reputation of that particular divinity.

Trickster, god of thieves, and other things that mostly were expressed by Jon wagging his eyebrows up and down when they were anywhere near his thoughts, but I was close enough to hear it.

It was a little surprising that he seemed to look like my brother, but I assumed that was because he was trying to lull me into complacency.  I still had no intention of marrying him, or, for that matter of revealing that long strand of pearls wound under my clothes.  I needed that strand of pearls to secure a comfortable living, so I wouldn’t have to marry whoever offered for me.  Because even if I couldn’t be a pirate queen, I was tired of living my life by someone else’s rules.

“You have to tell me where you want to go,” Hermes said.  “Else I can’t help you.”

I thought that if what I remembered from the stories was true, then whatever we told him would come true upside down and sideways, but then again, how would that be different from that very strange journey I’d embarked on when Betsy and I had transported to what we thought was Plymouth?

But before I could talk, Mr. Merrit spoke.  “We want to get out of here and back to the Earth of men, and I want the Lady Helen safe.”

I spoke over the end of it, and my voice came out in a sullen tone, “I want to be a pirate queen.”

Hermes had been nodding at Mr. Merrit but now turned to me, a sort of cackle escaping from his throat and, seemingly unwillingly, between his lips.  “You do, do you?” he said, and to my chock did exactly what Jonathan does when he thinks I’m being silly.  He patted my head, as though I were a cute child aged about six.  “Well, my dear, maybe someday you will be, but now is not a good time.”  Then he turned to Mr. Merrit, which did annoy me, because, after all, surely, I mattered too.  “I see that,” he said.  “Whether it is possible is something completely different.  I can surely get you to the world of men, and even to the vicinity of your place of residence, but whether that means you can be safe is something wholly different.  Three worlds are involved in this collision.  There will be none safe and possibly none alive, unless we find a way to stabilize and insulate each world from the others.”

“But I thought,” I said, “That the mythworld wanted the collision.”

“Zeus,” Hermes said, and it might have been a swearword.  “Wants many things, but when you’re that old, that powerful, and so many conflicting expectations have been laid on you, it is all a matter of conjecture whether what you want would be good for anyone, least of all you.  Never mind.  Some of us – myself and Loki and others have been wondering what to do if this disaster is going to let some of us escape alive.  Already, the old myths are bursting out.  The kingdom of Neptune is threatened by an ancient, nameless one, which is why the king wanted to marry you, hoping some of my magic—” He stopped abruptly.  “Never mind that.”

“But I do mind,” I said, primly.  “After all, you’re asking us to trust ourselves to you, and Loki, and I assume other rogues.  Why should we, when the powers of good are aligned against you.”

He grinned, and his grin was exactly like Jonathans before one of those words he wasn’t supposed to say in front of me escaped his lips – words like “round heels” and “tup.”

“Why should you indeed.  But lady, one thing you learn fast in this world is that ‘good’ is entirely relative.  For instance, Neptune is a good … creature, supposedly, but you refused to marry him.  And well done that, since he’s already married.  And The All Father… Zeus, Odin, whatever you wish to call him, has his own ideas about what is good, that don’t involve the convenience or even the life of anyone else.  In this case, he wants more power, and he wants our world to merge with yours again, at least to an extent, so we can again milk it of belief and energy.  The only way to do that – which will kill magic among humans – is to use Fairyland as fuel for the merge, which I understand will wholly consume Fairyland and in turn destroy all of the worlds.  We tried to explain this to him.  Hephestus himself… Never mind.  He would not listen, and he is sole ruler of mythworld.

“Sometimes, when the good people are disastrously wrong a confederacy of rogues is needed, and just such we’ve created.  And now, discounting that the lady can’t be a pirate just now – maybe later – I’ll conduct you to a portal that will take you to your home world.  This will greatly disappoint Neptune and Diana and most of all The All Father, but it must be done.  Follow me.  And don’t be afraid to walk normally.  I’ve cast a veil upon us.”

When I was kid, we got visitors in the village every spring and summer.  These were usually relatives who’d moved away long ago, but there were also friends and friends of friends.  I have a vague memory that, before I was six, my grandfather’s boss from his time in South Africa spent a summer with us.  I know other people – from the bigger cities or from abroad would come and spend summers in the village, living the simple life.

The verdict was always the same, and best summed up by the friend of a friend my mom had house-sit for her some years ago “It’s like going back to a simpler time.  It’s like a little slice of paradise?”

Was it a slice of paradise?

I confess that in my mind the time I go back to those long summer days.  In the nostalgic mind it’s always ninety degrees out, and the air is full of the scent of roses and ripening grapes.  There is no sound save from, very far away, a song – so distant that you can’t tell anything beyond its being music.  And I’m lying in bed, on crisp sun-dried sheets, reading.

But if I stop squinting quite so much, I’ll hear the mosquitos buzzing, and your choice is between turning out the light and not being able to read, or keeping the window closed and sweltering.  And the summer nights is when the garbage disposal plant near us – well over capacity – chose to burn the garbage outside (instead of inside the plant with filters.)  Since that plant processed all the waste from the city of Porto, you’d wake in the morning to the village blanketed in impenetrable smoke that stung your eyes and made it impossible to breathe.

If you go back before that, to the early seventies or late sixties, the village was even more… picturesque.  For instance, there was often an animated soccer game in the street in front of grandma’s house.  This is because there was maybe a car every three hours, and you could hear it coming a mile away.  This was before the garbage disposal plant got placed about a mile from the village, and when things were still so safe my brother used to take his books and transistor radio and go study in the middle of the woods and even I and my little friends could go on long unsupervised hikes.

There were village festivals.  On summer nights – it seemed like every night to me, but hey – there were often celebrations and parades up the street.  People gathered on their stoops to talk.

A slice of paradise!

Except that we were one of the very few families in the village which had a bathroom with running water.  But even there, given the difficulties of installing such things in a 100 year old house with rock-slab walls, the bathroom was outside the kitchen door.  This meant in winter (or even fall) at night, we used the guzunder which is what my friend Kate calls those useful porcelain (usually) containers that go under the bed for an emergency.  Not your more pleasant setup, even if part of human life for many centuries.

And because the only way to wash clothes was by hand, in the wash tank (in grandma’s house a square stone thing big enough to drown several grown men, at mom’s house only big enough to drown a small child.  Weirdly, my brother did almost drown in grandma’s, only they caught him in time and revived him.  Dying by drowning in the wash tank was fairly normal for kids my generation and older.  Every few years it would happen.) and could only dry them on the line, most people only washed/changed clothes once a week.  (We changed at least underclothes every day because mom is like that.  She dried the clothes in the kitchen, too, if it was too cold outside.  I remember lines strung back and forth everywhere except over the stove and the kitchen table.  Since that house, back when I was very little, was a shotgun apartment – kitchen, hall (where my brother slept) bedroom (where my parents slept.  I slept next door at my grandma’s, with my cousin Natalia) and front room/mom’s workshop, this meant that the kitchen was 1/3 our living space and the gathering place.  Right under the dripping clothes.

Grandma’s kitchen next door had a Franklyn stove, but that was the only heating around.  Sometimes, in winter, if you left a glass of water on the bedside table, there would be a thin crust of ice on it in the morning.

Even in my mom’s house – bathrooms inside, electricity in every room, and more than just the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling or, in other words, the height of luxury for the village – there was no heat.  (Part of this is that despite being a climate not un-akin to London, the North of Portugal thinks of itself as temperate or warmish, so they don’t think anyone needs heating.  This is a recent illusion.  My friend across the street lived in a Victorian that had radiant water heat – must have been the only heated house in the village.  I used to go over to sit on the radiator in her room.)  I spent a great part of my adolescence reading in bed, not because I was tired, but because I’m very cold-intolerant.

None of this is to complain understand.  If you squint at the village a certain way, it was a paradise.  It was certainly much better than most of humanity has had for most of human existence.

Squinted at another way… well… when the community organization started running the neighborhood (yea, exactly what you’re thinking) one of the few things they did that I could find no fault with was arrange to have showers installed in the nearby school, and to have them open to the public every Sunday with hours for men and hours for women.  This alone must have improved the health and longevity in the village exponentially (I moved here shortly after, so I haven’t tracked.)  Before that, there were people who simply didn’t have the facilities to bathe (not even the hip bath in front of the fire we had at Grandma’s.  There was a shower too, but it wasn’t heated and the only one who used it in Winter was dad who believed in the old Roman method of forestalling colds.  In my parents’ “new house’ built 1971, we had running hot water.  And inside, too.  The height of luxury.)  Most of the village didn’t use to bathe in winter at all, and the smell in any enclosed public gathering had to be smelled to be believed, particularly when you consider most people heated their houses with wood or coal.

We had cholera every summer and some sort of flu bug that killed all the elderly people in winter.

But the landscape was beautiful, the area pristine, and generally (except largely for me) the people who survived all this were fine specimens, because they had to be or they’d be dead.

Why am I going into all this?

Years ago, in the bar, I got in an argument with a fellow writer who said longevity hasn’t improved at all.  Humans have always lived about this long, if they survived infancy.

This is, pardon me, horse pokey. Which of course doesn’t prevent its being the currently prevailing archeological theory.

She “knew” this because she had studied an affluent village in Bavaria in the eighteenth century.  Head>hits>desk.  Guys, even then and there, there were differences.  You can say longevity was sort of the same if you eliminate all deaths by misadventure.  Because if you don’t eliminate those, there’s a hundred ways you can die, from a hangnail or an infected tooth.  (Which is why you shouldn’t eliminate those.  Antibiotics dramatically changed human life.  Yours truly would not have survived childhood had she been born 20 years earlier.)  And even then, it’s close to our life now, only if you think that most people die in their sixties.  (No, they don’t.)

I can’t even begin to imagine how people can believe this, unless people my age in the States lived at a much, much, much higher level.  I met exactly one person over eighty when I was a kid, and let me tell you, he was not like my parents who are still largely active and self-sustaining, nor even like my grandmother who lived independently and self-sufficient until 87.  Go back just twenty years from that – when I was little, and sixty was “very old.”

Maybe people in the little village were unusually sturdy.  Maybe – and my mom and dad maintain this happened in their childhood – childhood conditions were so horrific that only the strong survived, and so those lived maybe to their seventies.

Maybe.  Or maybe there was the usual slapdash way of recording births and deaths, and people were assumed to be a lot older than they were.  (It was said that Shakespeare was “very old” when he died, but worked out, he was about 58, that is seven more years than I am now.  For that matter we’re not sure EXACTLY how old my dad is.  The only thing we know is that he couldn’t have been born on his official date of birth.  And this in a fairly bureaucratic society.)

My son volunteers at the hospital.  The only people coming in dying of old age, and in conditions when they usually can’t cope are in their hundreds.

When I was a kid there was doubt people could live till their hundreds.  The few cases, usually featured on TV, “Auntie Isolda lived to be 100 by eating a pound of dried carp a week” my dad would scoff at and say that they’d got her birth registration wrong.  Now, it’s not even unusual.

Now, does everyone live to that age?  Well, no.  The picking off starts at round my age, and continues at a merry pace, but there is enough of a percentage hitting 100 that it’s not that big a deal.  (The hard and fast unbreakable line seems to be 114 right now.)  It is, to my “feel” of it, the equivalent of hitting 74 in the village in the old days.

I was talking to Charlie Martin about this the other day and he said that we seem to have roughly doubled the expected human lifespan but no one has noticed.

No one has noticed because the theory, of course, is that “people lived about the same time.”

They didn’t.  I didn’t grow up in the eighteenth century.  I didn’t grow up in a real third world country.  But I remember when people died and of what.  I also remember, for that matter their finding the skull of the Tsar of Russia and finding he had had a permanent abscess in his mouth.  Guys, this was one of the wealthiest persons in the world.

Abcesses, uncured infections that left weak points, people who did die of little trifling colds…

No matter how much you tell me life expectancy past childhood was about the same I’m going to say you’re full of it.

It’s like telling me the village was a slice of paradise.  Oh, sure.  It was pretty.  And we loved some parts of living there – but it was not comfortable, hygienic or very healthy.

You see, there are different ways of looking at data.  For instance, I was reading about the thirties in England (yes, THAT backburnered project.)  It was a scholarly booklet put out by Oxford (I think) and there it was how after WWI people came back, and they were displaced from their traditional occupations in the countryside, and they were living in urban slums and oh, the horror.  But in the chapter on appliances they forgot this and talked about people – even lower middle class people – buying domestic electrical appliances.  Oh, also, rural estates were overrun with suburban houses built for the working class.

At which point I wondered if they read themselves and how they squared the contradiction.

But they weren’t interested in that.  They were interested in running down modernity and capitalism.  Hence, older times were better.

This is partly noble-savagism (totally a word) partly eco-savagism (totally a concept.  It’s the desire to believe that if we all went to a “sustainable” society where the most advanced concept is the grass skirt there wouldn’t be massive deaths or famines) and partly Marxist-savagism (which is the belief you need wise top-down leaders to prevent you from being rooked out of paradise as your ancestors were.)

It’s also a strong dose of “I want to believe.”  I don’t know what the heck it is in the human mind that makes us wish to believe in a lost paradise.  But something there is, and you can’t beat it down with a stick.  (Give me a stick large enough and I shall move the world.  Ahem.)

This is the same thing that has led people to SERIOUSLY claim that hunter-gatherers were healthier.  They base this on a few skeletons found.  Brother!  Of course they were healthy.  Given how hard the life of modern primitives is, you had to be healthy to survive to be of advanced enough age to merit a burial.  (Let alone the fact that most of the tombs we found are, of necessity, royalty.  That corrupts every such study up to the very recent time because (if what I read in that book about burials in London was true) paupers were often buried in ways that either left no trace or would be er… interesting to excavate.)

Me?  I accord my ancestors the same respect I accord members of other races. I don’t think they were idiots.  No, they weren’t always in control of their own fates.  (Dad’s ancestors have a fatal – or often near fatal – attraction to lost causes.)  They lacked that control the same way we lack it.  I might believe I know exactly what’s wrong with the economy (too much regulation, too much money printing, too much wrong-headed fiscal theory) but the truth is that I can’t just tell the idiots in charge to move over and let me drive for a while.

But to the extent they could make choices – agriculture over hunting gathering, indoor plumbing over lack thereof, motors over oxcarts – I trust them to have made choices rational beings would make.

And I don’t believe they needed wise leaders, any more than I need a wise leader.  I believe most of them could match wits with most leaders throughout history (most of whom, after all could figure out which end of a queen to set the crown on one try out of three.)

You can tell me it’s been a long slow way down for humanity from some imagined paradise. And I can tell you that unless you believe in noble savages, you can rinse your assumptions and start again.

In some regions, for some brief time, you might have had near-paradise.  But compared to us?  We are healthier and wealthier than Pharaoh in all his glory.  Caesar’s legions couldn’t secure for him the comforts of someone who lives on welfare in most regions in the US.  And I believe PJ O’Rourke about the ad in Pravda in the final days of the Soviet Union, “Will trade state assigned apartment in Moscow for sleeping bag over grate on the streets of New York City.”

And it would be a poor trade for the person getting the apartment in Moscow.  Even if you throw in all the comforts Charlemagne enjoyed.

I’ll take antibiotics, running water and the lack of need for a guzunder, thank you so much. And I’ll take the possibility of living to 100 or near there.

You can keep your splendid primitives.  Me and mine will do what we can to stop you subverting civilization.

Like the village when I was a child, the past is very scenic.  Provided you don’t have to live there.

Tomorrow there will be a post by James Cambias about the wonder of Human Wave SF!

Oh — the reason is that this weekend I’m taking the Superstars Writing Seminar.  (In the coldest days of the year!)

Would you ask the homeless person down the street how to conduct your sex life?

Would you approach the guy mumbling incoherent stuff and peeing on himself whether you should have a boyfriend or three?  Have casual sex?  Would you ask him if he has done that, and if it made him happy?

Okay, let’s go with a slightly less outrageous example – instead of the homeless guy down the street, you knock on your neighbor’s door and ask.  He doesn’t speak English very well, but he looks like a happy enough guy, and his kids always smile at you.  So, would you ask him how early your kids should have sex and with whom?  And whether you should experiment with group sex?  And take his answer when he tells you what he’s done and how happy it’s made him?  And change your entire life around to be JUST like his – or at least just like he tells you it is?

No?  Why not?  Western civilization did that.  Western civilization still is doing that.

Yesterday for some reason I got suckered into reading about Margaret Meade and the whole Samoan “Was it an hoax or not?”

Of course in anthropological circles, it is considered heretical to say she was hoaxed, or to say that Derek Freeman proved she was hoaxed.  In fact, most of the anthropologists seem to ostracize anyone who suggests she was hoaxed.

For those following this at home, without a score card, who have no idea who Margaret Meade is or why they should give a hang: Margaret Meade went to Samoa in the twenties, to study whether in a more sexually free society (note the assumption) adolescence was easier and less neurotic.  The book she published, upon return, was the seminal work of cultural anthropology.  It also – because she claimed that Samoans lived in a free-love paradise, where neither incest nor adultery, nor ANYTHING was considered taboo and that they were far less neurotic than us – launched most of the totally insane theories about sex of the sixties and seventies.  Including the strange idea that if humans just slept with everyone who asked, they’d be happier, less aggressive and less neurotic.

Years later, Derek Freeman went to Samoa hoping to corroborate Margaret Mead’s study.  Instead, he found one of the most sexually regulated (repressed, if you will, but that word smacks of Freudianism) societies on Earth and convincing evidence that Margaret Mead was hoaxed.

When he presented that evidence, he found himself outcast, because Margaret Mead was a grand damme of the left, the mother of feminist sexual liberation and of the free love movement.  (No, really.  There’s no other reason for the way people reacted to him.)

To be fair I don’t think it what happened with mead was an hoax, as such.  Oh, sure, I’m fairly sure those girls, her informants, lied to her.  At least a bit.  And exaggerated.  And probably tried to figure out how to gross her out.  The reason I assume this is that my friends and I – far more sophisticated (at least in theory) than the Samoan girls, and far more aware than they of what our studies would be used for – told the most outrageous lies to anthropologists who interviewed us in middle and high school.  In middle school, in particular, when sex was both icky and funny.  And in high school, at one point a study from my class in a strict all-girls’ school revealed that 90% of the girls were not virgins and had lost their virginity to a bottle.  Guys, this was an academic magnet school.  These were my friends.  I was one of them.  We were, I’d guess 90% virginal with maybe 5% involved in various kinds of lesbianism (Some of it, at least, deprivation lesbianism–  periodically they busted a couple.  The most inventive ones had a love nest under some bushes in the garden.  One of them was the first of us to get married – yes, to a guy – because she was knocked up.  She had twins.  Never mind.)  The others fell into various situations, including the ones who actually had boyfriends/were engaged and might be physically involved with these guys.

So, I’m sure these girls – who were, after all, adolescent girls told this strange woman asking about embarrassing subjects the most outrageous lies, part to see how far she’d swallow them and part to see if she’d go away.

But there is no way – none – they could have hoaxed her so far as for her to believe she’d found the perfect free love (where even incest wasn’t taboo!) society, if she didn’t want to believe it.  In fact the “I wanna believe” was the main component of it.

I know, I know, people get very weird and the anthropologists assure us that in the years between her study and Derek Freeman’s, which debunked her study, the island had changed that much, and become “that much more repressive.”

I’m sorry, that dog won’t hunt.

Some of the things Derek Freeman found out were that the rape statistics from that time were not what Margaret Meade claimed.  That’s not a matter of “the culture changed.”

The article I found that tries to balance it all, claims that what changed was not the observed – Samoan culture – but the observers.  When Margaret Meade went out, supposedly (I’d roll my eyes, but I think they rolled under the desk) America was repressed and puritanical, while when Derek Freeman studied them western culture had been changed by free love to such an extent that he thought them repressed compared to us.

I’m sorry.  That dog really won’t hunt.  I think he’s dead.

What THAT article claims is that, despite the supposed worshiping of “virginity” girls used sex to lure men to marriage; despite the ideal of a big church wedding, most marriages happened by elopement, after sleeping together.  What he’s saying, in fact, is that these rules were honored more in the breach than in fact.

In other words, they were, in fact, exactly like every other human society in the world, where real humans always fall short of the ideal morals and precepts.

None of which explains the “they don’t have any rules and do everything that moves and that’s why no one is neurotic” that Margaret Mead came home with.

I don’t think it was so much of an hoax as the eye of the beholder.

Which would have been okay, if not for the fact that for whatever reason (WWI, WWII, loss of cultural confidence, cultural betrayal, and the ever pervasive myth of the noble savage) the western world decided to take this truly shaky study and make it into a model for how to run the western world’s sex life.  (Would someone find my eyes?  I think they rolled under the desk.)

This myth of the happy go lucky Samoans who sleep with everything tied in with the ideas of the noble savage, the Marxist idea that wanting to own things was somehow wrong and a sign of neurosis, the confusion between marriage and ownership, the Freudian idea that not being repressed at all – no frustrations! – would make everyone an angel and the American can do idea (“We can change everything.  We can make it better.”)

The end result was the free love movement of the sixties, the “if it feels good do it” still being pushed at us, and the idea that to abstain somehow makes you “sick.”

Yes, before you ask, a lot of this ethos permeated Heinlein’s work, because – here we go again – Heinlein was a man of his time, and read the scientific papers, and this was science with a capital S.

So… women were empowered/encouraged to have sex with no commitment.  So were men.  Women are still being pushed into this.  Now, with men everything is aggression and the can’t look wrong at a woman without being accused of assault.

How did it work out?  Are we in a wonderful, liberated future with no repression and no neurosis?

Brother.  It worked out exactly as it would have worked out for the Samoans if they’d really lived that way.

Human beings crave connection and structure.  Yes, if the structure is too demanding/unattainable, they will betray it in fact, but serve it in word.

As for neurosis…  We now have feminists so exquisitely “liberated” they think it’s unnatural to have sex with men, period.  And women on college campuses are threatened by a realistic statue of a man in his underwear.

No neurosis at all, right?

The really funny thing is that Heinlein based the sexual aspects of his later novels on that research and based his societies on those ideas, but the same feminists who will defend Mead to the death will scream that he has “too much sex” in his novels and that he was “a dirty old man.”

(Ah, there are my eyes.  Does anyone have a cup I can use to conveniently roll them?)  You’d think it’s almost like all they have against Heinlein is that he never catered to their other political delusions, still believed in women having kids, and, oh, yeah, that he had a penis.  Particularly that.

The other funny thing is that they’re still defending Mead, even though we’ve seen through the last… seventy? Years of experimentation with an approximation to Meade’s “no inibitions” ideal that it just doesn’t work as advertised – what it produces is women who feel used, (Credit Heinlein with that insight “When women insist on absolute equality, they end up with the dirty end of the stick.”) men who never engage in the “father/husband” mode, and kids who are left to grow up alone and abandoned, or as wards of the state.  What we’ve found is that more and more women are asking the state to hurt men for them and treating the state as a sugar daddy.  What we’ve found is that there ain’t no pot of gold at the end of that there rainbow.

And yet, they still defend her “conclusions.”  You see, the reason paradise failed to happen is capitalism.  Oh, yeah, and patriarchy.  And patriarchal capitalism.  And capitalist patriarchy.  Never mind the fact that we’re fairly well informed of our history some 3000 years, with decent extrapolation for the rest; that capitalism has existed in any form for maybe 400 years, and that the world has not gotten worse or less tolerant, and certainly not poorer in that time.

Worse – and this is mind boggling – we’re still going to primitive tribes/isolated populations, in out of the way places, in search of our “natural” way of being.

Guys, the natural way for our ancestors to be was starved, disease infested and short-lived.  Also, if they like other simians lived in bands, oppressed by unbelievable tyranny of those in charge of the band.  No, seriously.  Your ancestors have spent the last however many millennia getting away from the “natural way to be” – why would you want to go back?

The studies aren’t always pushing a leftist point of view.  This doesn’t make them ANY MORE SANE or safe to take at face value.

I looked for and couldn’t find the article on this study that went to some primitive tribe and came back claiming they had no homosexuals.  None at all.  They didn’t even know they existed.  And every married couple in the tribe had sex like ten times a night, and yep, there is no neurosis and no one—

Guys!  Seriously.  There are also no homosexuals in Iran, according to Themadjihad.  And if you didn’t have evidence otherwise, through the people who manage to sneak out articles and pictures, some anthropologist would probably believe him.

There is homosexuality in every higher mammal, most of it dominance behavior, but a lot of it… uh… not.

Throughout history, homosexuals have been condemned to various forms of unpleasant death, when discovered, and yet, there were still homosexuals, as there are still homosexuals in Russia and Islamic countries, where it is very dangerous to be gay.

Whether you think it should/could be eliminated or not, it’s fairly clear that simply “we have sex with our wives multiple times a night” is NOT a cure for it.  (It is also obvious that in any civilized nation there isn’t enough energy to have sex multiple times a night EVERY night.  Hey, look, I’d love to.  I’m sure you’d love to also but there are jobs to go to in the morning, and kids who won’t go to sleep till midnight, and…)

There are two levels of craziness here.

A)    Assuming that someone in another culture, particularly a tribal culture, suspicious of outsiders, is going to tell you the truth about a function that in every human society – particularly tribal and isolated ones – is edged around with taboos and prohibitions.

B)    Taking whatever you manage to find out and viewing it as a manual to improve life in the most successful society that humans have ever formed on this planet.

This is exactly like the successful CEO going out and asking the guy on the corner how to be happy.  There have been several stories and movies on this theme, and most of them induce eye rolling to the extreme.  Because in real life we all know how this would go.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t practice cultural anthropology.  Of course, there is something to be said for knowing how other humans live.  But clearly not only must we make the thing more like a science – making sure we remove as much as possible the wishful thinking of the researcher – we also must not go about “applying” this knowledge before it has been confirmed several times, by several studies.

To me these announcements of the complete breakthrough difference of the sexual mores of “isolated” or “tribal” human populations strike me as incredibly racist. To believe there is a human population on Earth that practices PERFECT free love, with no jealousy and no consequences, you have to believe they’re a different species, free of all normal human impulses.  The same thing btw is necessary to believe there is a human population on Earth completely free of homosexuality.  (Homosexual behavior rises with the decrease of a species dimorphic difference.  I.e. the more the sexes look like each other, the more homosexual sex.  And in animal term, we humans are almost as alike as penguins.  Maybe more.)

Yes, humans have tried various forms of mating, with more or less success: from patriarchies to matriarchies, from one-on-one pairing to harems.  (To celibacy, but those didn’t last.)  I understand there are successful group and line marriages among science fiction fans (an odd group to begin with.)  Some of these even work pretty well for that population, at that time.

Would they work for the rest of the world, all the time?  What? Have humans stopped being humans?  Will conditions and ways of living never change? Will the best strategy today be the best strategy forever?

There is no recorded case – ever – of a human group exactly following the rules no matter how strict or how lax.

There is no recorded case — ever — in human history where humans didn’t lie about how much/little sex they’re having, or what kind, for that matter.

And there is no recorded society in history that was perfectly happy and free of neurosis.

To pursue this sort of state by imitating small, tribal societies – or worse, by imitating what we believe they are – is not just insane.  It’s completely insane.

How about we accept we’re humans?  Sex is a great thing, but it is both more and less than what we have tried to make it in the last sixty/seventy years.  It is far more than the appetites we share with dogs – sex in most cases (at least the best sex) comes with emotional attachment and – for permanence – with mutual obligations.  It is also no universal panacea, no cure-all and CERTAINLY no bridge to an earthly paradise.

Freud is dead.  So is Margaret Mead.  The Samoans were never completely happy.  Neither are we.

Perhaps we can accept that we’re humans and that one solution fits all only works in the cemetery, and event here only with adjustments.

Perhaps we are now grown up enough to put our pants back on, or at least to not ask the homeless guy if we should put them on or pull them off?

Or we could send another emissary to modern-day primitives and ask THEM the secret of happiness.

Unfortunately, I know what we’re likely to do.

So, apparently the non-binary gender chick (no, it’s not sexist.  I’m very non-binary in that.  Any wimpy, over-educated hot house flower with tender feelings and its head up its own yaya is a chickie.  The ones who happen to have a penis are the worst) wimped out of her crusade and entertained herself with reviewing an eighties book that is about a character with non-standard gender presentation.

As someone who despite DD cups and a face not even her own father would call chiseled or rugged routinely gets addressed as “sir” and was more than once addressed as “sir” and/or treated as a guy even when she was 17 and in a red dress and pumps (no, I don’t get it either.  I’ve encountered people like that, though, when I was working retail.  When I looked away from them to do something I remembered them as the opposite gender. Perhaps I camouflage well) I wish that character should cry me a river.

No, for the record, I don’t want to become a guy. (Nor do I think I’m “really” a guy.) I’m happily, not to say enthusiastically, heterosexual so becoming a guy to go after guys would be stupid.  Also, frankly, some of us have seen the binary categories for what they are.  I.e. some of us have caught on to the fact that “the contents don’t always correspond to label.  Some settling might have occurred during shipping.”  Or in adult terms, there’s the binary polar opposites, and then there is the real world presentation where on average most women have mostly stereotypical girly characteristics (you bastages can have my collection of snazzy shoes when you pry them out of my cold dead hands.  Also, the house must be clean to GIRL standards.  Also, seriously, I throw like a girl.  And my collection of lipstick is second only to my collection of shoes.  Yes, people still call me “sir” while I’m in red high heels and lipstick. [And other clothes, before you ask.  Have some carp!] No, I don’t want to probe that.  Yes, it pisses me off.) and most men still have mostly stereotypical manly characteristics, but in any real world individual distribution is “human and imperfect” not “human stamped pink or human stamped blue.”  This does not mean the classifications are invalid.  The classifications are opposite poles of the statistic distribution of gender characteristics.

IOW only someone who has done most of her growing up in books would mistake “archetype” for “the only ones allowed to exist,” and think that in the real world or in any good books gender is ever “binary” which I assume she thinks means two categories and nothing outside them, in between them or blended from them.  (There are only ten types of people in the world.  The ones who understand binary, and the ones who don’t.)  When in fact, in the real world and in good books the opposite is almost the exact truth.  (Everyone is an individual and some people are more feminine/masculine than others, but no one is “pure” anything — least of all pure stereotype.)

And I don’t know what books she did her growing up in, but it wasn’t the chronicles of our sci-fictional kind.  No, seriously.  For instance, in this particularly book that she’s so impressed with, apparently the final conclusion is that the character is neither male or nor female.  (Rolls eyes so hard they roll on the floor.  Would someone find them please?  I’ll touch type in the meantime.) I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how it’s done.  There was a book – Waiting for the Mahdi, the name of the author evades me – where it was done very well and the character was truly between the genders.  However, the startled wonder and amazement of the Non Binary Gender Chickie who is convinced this is the first time this was done in SF – Darling, really, Google The World Well Lost by Theodore Sturgeon.  Sheesh, you kids are so cute —  makes me think that she’s not read much sf/f, really. (And hasn’t lived much either.)

Now, I’m not going to say that this is a triumph of education over real life, or that this poor chickie must have led a very sheltered existence, because I don’t know her.  After all, the Aspergers spectrum is rife in our field, and even people who are not technically Aspergers have acquired some of the modes of the spectrum through contact – and one of the characteristics of my Aspergers friends is believing what they’ve been told or read (even the fiction!) over what they see with their lying eyes.  This is part of the whole needing to put things in categories and classify them, something that the real world is notoriously averse to.

It’s entirely possible, if she’s of the kind who’d rather believe classifications and classes than their eyes, that she simply took a degree in one of the various Marxist disciplines that are so good at the classifications and stratification.  Women’s Studies, for instance.  Or Post Modern Involute Reasoning of some description.  In that case, she might have been a perfectly normal human being who has become a “no obvious gender definitions” chickie, hopefully temporarily.

This is, of course, neither here nor there – though if she’s in any way redeemable, we wish her a speedy cure, because going through life confused about the meanings of BOTH “gender” and “binary” is a sad way to exist and also because I suspect she’s very uncomfortable over not EXACTLY fitting what she views as “female” and thinks is mandatory (Darling, it’s like your mother’s shoes.  Even when you grow to the right size, they won’t fit right, because it’s not you.  It’s her.  In the end, growing up is about becoming YOURSELF.  And none of us are archetypes or stereotypes.  This is why we’re individual human beings.  Familiarize yourself with this idea.  Did you know that our Constitution is supposed to maximize INDIVIDUAL liberty?  You don’t have to fit any dead communist’s idea of classes, either) – because what I find amusing about all this incident, including the attempt to Correiarize Correia by a gentleman who brought a knife to an intellectual machine gun fight, is not that she’s limited herself now to writing book reviews, instead of trying to shame people who write… you know… men who are mostly men and women who are mostly women, like what happens in what we mostly call the real world.

No, what I find interesting and amusing is that it has confirmed something I’ve long suspected( as well as my impression that reports of our cultural demise are greatly exaggerated).  I’ve long suspected that the maintenance of the ever-more-divorced-from-reality-victim-classifying- and-rewarding-culture (that is … post-communist, or at least what communism became after it was proven nonviable as an economic system) depends on a monolithic information/entertainment system.  But the monolithic information/entertainment system seeds its own demise.

They fully conquered the system at least two/three decades ago and had it pretty much staffed it with fellow-travelers fifty years ago.  They disseminated truth from above. People who disagreed with them were culturally isolated and shunned.  Meanwhile, the opinion makers lived in the original echo chamber as they spun further and further away from reality.

This is how we come by the spectacle of a very young writer lecturing the rest of us on the need to write non-standard sexual personae and CLEARLY imagining that SF exists circa, oh, the thirties or forties (even in the fifties there were, if you knew how to read, very many non-standard sexual personae in SF/F.)

You see, SF/F is a literature of the weird, the strange and the far fetched.  Even those of us who, should we be more heterosexual would have to be tied down (those who’ve had the first book of Star Cat Chronicles inflicted on them at workshops KNOW what I mean),  are fascinated with non standard identities, which, by definition, extend to sexual personae and feminine/masculine non-standard distribution.  (And which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what the person or character is attracted to.  … In my case, for instance, I’m attracted to mathematicians.  Okay, Mathematician.  I’m deathly monogamous.)

Again, the strangeness is not that she presumes to lecture us to “write fewer standard males and females, ya’ll” which would, at best, cause us to smile and pat her on the head.  No, the true bizarreness which has caused us to do a double take, swallow our tongue and not even know how to answer, is that she seems to think she just discovered this.

(Frankly it is as funny and sad as when my boys – and both hit this at around 14 or 15 would make jokes about some sex act they’d just heard of, all you know, implication and nudge nudge, and get shocked half out of their socks when Dan and I caught it, picked it up and took it to the next level.  The priceless look on each of their faces as they realized that their generation did not IN FACT invent sex, not even particularly dirty sex, will warm the cockles of my heart forever. We only had to do this ONCE, too.  After that the untrained puppies realized there were bigger dogs in the pack.)

That strangeness – I am a science fiction writer – has caused me to wonder if she is an alien.  An alien would, of course, believe what it says on the label about “what males are” and “what females are” and then — realizing the discrepancy with real world people — would agitate for us to have other labels.

It would never occur to the alien that the other labels are there all along, not as prescriptive absolutes, but in the form of realistic characters in novels and movies (and yes, yes, plays — Has this sheltered flower of Academia ever watched Twelfth Night, one wonders?  Never mind. “My father had a daughter loved a man, As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship.”…… “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, And all the brothers too: and yet I know not.”)

The thing is that she IS an alien, you know?

The system in which she’s been raised, the authorities she respects, the people who have informed her precarious culture all have told her that we live in a world of binary choices, that capitalism is essentially about making you fit in a mold (Darling, they sold you a bill of goods.  It’s the top down systems that do this.  Think about China, or for that matter Russia.  Out here, in businessman’s land, we don’t care what you think you are.  If you think you’re a fish, we’ll sell you the gills to cosplay.) And that she needs to speak truth to power (Darling, child, oh, sweet innocent one, to find out if you really are speaking (unpleasant) truth to power observe what gets rewarded.  Note that no one has ever gone broke praising Marxism, and think carefully about who “the man” in power really is) against this oppressive system, that exists ONLY in her mentor’s mind.

She’s a good girl.  She’s trying hard to obey the precepts she was taught and the voices in her TV from all the “opinion makers.”  She’s trying to be the voice of the voiceless.  She’s trying to carry aloft the banner against capitalist repression (Darling, we’ll sell you a better banner.  At half price.) She’s trying to give back to the community that exists only in her own mind.

She has no idea why all these evil Haters McHateys came out to yell at her, because she’s only doing what she was taught to make the world a better place.

The world is full of these injustices.  And since the information/entertainment complex is no longer a unified top down voice, we’re going to see a lot more of these moments, these bizarre public confrontations.

You see, until about five years ago, we who laughed behind our hands at this exquisite divorce from reality, would have stayed quiet.  Had to.  Our only hope of publication once we were out politically was Baen and nothing outside it, and we had meals to buy and baby needed shoes.  Now?

Ah!  Outside Baen I wouldn’t CONSENT to work with one of the publishing houses.  I don’t trust them.  They’re aliens.  And not friendly aliens.  And I never hankered for awards beyond the one I won (Prometheus) and I couldn’t be bothered with the accolades of the alien system.

All I ever hoped for out of writing was to make a living, and that’s happening more and more with a lot of work (but I never expected not to work, either.)

They have nothing I want.  They certainly have nothing I need.  And I’m not alone.

To make things worse, for all these years, they’ve been able to go off more and more on their insanity, drinking their own ink (Darling, that’s unhealthy!) and spinning more and more out of contact with reality till to be a “real radical” you had to say completely insane things and demand that everyone follow them. (“PIV is unnatural, because first time hurts!  “PIV” is totally a thing, because I can’t say heterosexual sex, because that would be like hatey mchatey and stuff! Women have mental communication with plants! My head is made of cabbage and I mainlined an entire DVD of Avatar!”)  And we didn’t say anything, because we wanted to eat.

Then suddenly… suddenly it’s all changed, and when they say what is – I want you to understand this – in their circles completely unexceptionable and sensible, the world explodes around them.

They have no explanation for it.  They try to mau-mau those double-plus-ungood thinkers (it works in colleges still!) and call us names, and we laugh in their faces.

We’re seeing that happen more and more.  And it will only accelerate as the preference cascade unrolls.  You can only keep a completely unrealistic system of beliefs in place if you can make sure no one publicly laughs at it.  Not just that most people don’t laugh at it, but that no one laughs at it.  Because once someone shows up laughing at it in public, other would-be-mockers know they’re not alone.  More coherent systems than this and older and more dignified too, have fallen to the pointing finger and the horse laugh.

The Media is hitting the same wall – their attempts to talk up the Summer of Recovery 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and… what is it now? Six? – fall on their faces.  The only power they retain is the power to demonize and I’m going to go out on a limb and say even that will fail them before the end of this year. Because once you see it’s only a painted devil, you’re not afraid anymore.

And then?  And then they run around in circles, confused about why it’s not working.  They pressed the button.  Why didn’t the lever fall?  The racist/sexist capitalists aren’t crying in shame?  Why not?  Dang it.  Is this thing broken?

Hello, hello?  Who is out there?

If any writer had ever written about non standard gender/sexual personae before the mid-eighties, which OF COURSE never happened, we could even quote him to echo their disconsolate and confused cries.  They know who they are, with their little clique, out there in the dark – but who are all you zombies? ;)

I’ve been listening to If This Goes On in audiobook while I clean the house.  I still think that Heinlein was right about the coming theocracy – that is he was right about the theocratic impulse that he saw in the American people.  I see it too.  It’s what I’ve referred to in the past as Americans being, in the community of nations, the Aspergers kid who takes things seriously, things that no one else accepts as written/said.  This has a good side, such as a lot of us taking things like the Constitution very seriously, and a bad side, such as people taking the whole multiculti thing seriously.  (The rest of the world might parrot it, but no, they don’t take it seriously.)

The problem was that Heinlein was a man of his time – as we are all men and women of our time, and it would be good for certain people on the extreme left to remember that – and his place, and when he thought of “theocracy” he thought in terms of traditional religion.

I think it’s funny, since even as he wrote If This Goes On that “traditional religion” he spoke of was vanishing from the world.  It was largely gone from Europe, and the seeds of its vanishing were already planted in the states.  Religious faith in a supernatural power was in fact being replaced with a faith in the state as the arbitrary of morals and the end of all psychic life — a faith that would penetrate even the Catholic church and most of the protestant churches in the US (no? Ask any mainline minister/priest about government help to the poor/immigration laws/socialized health.)

Now, when I say Heinlein didn’t see it, I should say he didn’t consciously see it.  True artists see thing with other than their conscious mind.

Though Nehemiah Scudder is not Christian as such, he is “Christianish” and the religion is definitely supposed to ark to the Christian fundamentalism of Heinlein’s youth.  He mentions in fact the first prophet teaching at Mississipi  Valley tent revivals and all the names of places/mapping of the character’s mind is Bible-related.

This to me is the most alien part of Heinlein’s world building, and the reason I never got Job, A Comedy of Justice.  I was not raised in a religion that in any way resembled that strain of American religion.  My own spiritual formation was far more haphazard, but also more mystical and less rigid.  And, again, by the time I became aware of it, in the early seventies, in Europe, religion in all its forms was sneered at by all “right thinking people.”  (Yes, I’m religious.  I’m contrary.  Deal.)

Of course, the fact that this supposed “monolithic” religious consensus was already dissolving is what allowed Heinlein to publish works like If This Goes On and Job and even Stranger, I guess.  The intellectual life of this country had broken free from traditional religion shortly after WWI, as it did all over the world.  Part of it was the recoil at the war.  A lot of it might have been the fruits of the French revolution.  (Things work themselves very slowly through the collective mind.)  And of course the blossoming of the state, and the edging out of religion in favor of the state had been going on for a long time — since at least Henry VIII.

To me this was obvious as was what might or might not have been obvious to Heinlein (I think to a certain extent he saw it, but perhaps not consciously) because I was born almost sixty years later, and in a place where the transfer of moral arbitration from the divinity to the national state was almost completed. (And not because I am more of a clear thinking than Heinlein, thank you so much.  I don’t intend to be haunted.)

Now, before you think this is a Heinlein bashing post and before the Heinlein bashing brigade sashays over, let me repeat what I said before: Heinlein was a man of his time.  Science fiction pretends to have a crystal ball, and convincingly written science fiction is good enough to pass as the future to contemporaries.

It is not, however, an act of prophecy, and that science fiction which is convinced it is is the worst of all (No?  Read some of “the ice age is coming” sf from the seventies, or the “we’re all burning up” from the late eighties/early nineties.  It wasn’t even believable THEN such its righteous air of jumping on the bandwagon.)

However, Heinlein was a good artist and like all good artists (Pratchett, anyone?) saw things he might not even have been aware he was seeing.

Nehemiah Scudder might have been intended for a fundamentalist preacher, with only a vague whitewashing so it could be published, but forget that part.  That part was sort of a reflex from Heinlein’s own upbringing.

Instead, let’s analyze what Nehemiah was.  He was someone infused with a set of beliefs that denied the American constitution and the right of free people to rule themselves.  He rode to power on a set of beliefs that were supposed to be “good” for people.  The “moral” thing to do that would get us to paradise.  His policies more or less crashed the economy, at least in relation to the rest of the world, and were completely devoid of contact with reality.  His moral precepts were all pervasive and impinged on everything – and he rewrote the past and made people think he had come to power over a terrible, heathen land – and that there had been no free citizens before him.

I was going to say “let us not make invidious comparisons” but you’re free men and women and I’m not going to dictate what you can and cannot think.  Instead, I’m going to point out that the worship of the state and that beast which goes under the name of Progressivism is in fact a religion.

Someone said it’s not a religion but a cult, because religions are more internally consistent, but that’s not true.  They’re comparing the religion of Progressivism to Judaism and Christianity.  Those tend to be internally consistent, or at least its followers try to make it so – in the present era.

This was not always so, and it certainly doesn’t apply to every religion, particularly not to folk religions.  I know.  I grew up in an area where every invader and every ruler left behind a piece of folk religion and a bit of superstition.  People believed in them all and in the official religion, regardless of the contradictions.

This is more what Progressivism resembles.  It’s made of the myths of many groups, all of which are sure they’re THE group and willing to tolerate fellow travelers.  Thus progressive women have their myths, starting with the Earthly paradise of the matriarchy and ending, eventually with the restoration of the same matriarchy.  Black supremacists… we won’t go into their myths.  We’ll just say they deny other races full humanity.  If you poke around, you’ll find it.  And the myths of the class warriors start in a distant paradise of Rosseau-like nonsense, where men neither spun nor labored and yet had everything they needed, through the current vale of tears of Capitalism, which is weirdly responsible for every human vice (that is for vices that existed before it existed) and which will end in the wonderful classless society of the future, where, to quote Star Trek, “we don’t have money, we just work because we want to.”  (Thus throwing all the credits system away.  Never mind.)

And the impulse that drives this type of worship of the government is the same impulse that drove the Prophet’s sacred armies in If This Goes On.

The excuse is not divine, it’s more suited to our times.

For over a century people – who really don’t know a scientific principle from a hole in the ground – have been preached to about science as the ultimate arbiter of all things.  And of course, the state is run according to ‘science’ and enforces ‘science.’

It’s truly amazing how much we resemble medieval peasants, who believed in the divine right of kings.

Look – science and capitalism (the real science, i.e. things that are provably so, not the nebulous foggy computer model predictions which can only be considered to be coming through if you squint and shake the magic eight ball) have lifted humans above our normal condition of poverty.  They also made the “ruling elites” and the would be ruling elites very uncomfortable.

There is a subset of human for whom it is not sufficient to be happy or rich.  His neighbors must be miserable and poor.  This is manifest usually by trying to distance oneself from those one considers one’s social inferiors.  As someone who shops in thrift stores and loves diners, I’ve been known to shock other college-educated women with my “plebian” tastes.  They might not be any better off than I, but by gum, they keep a proper distance.  (I always sucked at this, and it was even worse in Portugal than here.  The classes are more distinct.)

This I suppose is normal monkey behavior.  At least Dave Freer tells me simian bands signal “class and status” all the time.  I don’t know.  By those lights, I’m a rather crazy monkey, since I do what I like to do and damn the torpedoes.

That subset of the “elites” has been dying to bring back the proper state of things, where they get to enjoy all this improved stuff, but the peasants are kept in their right place.

If you look at most of the dictates of our state and its “green” obsession, you’ll see just that.  We won’t go into the hubris of imagining that humans have that much effect upon the Earth or the “read me” files, or…  We’ll just go into the fact that if the Earth were in fact cooling disastrously or burning up disastrously, there would be scientific solutions to the problem (and actually a warmer temperature wouldn’t be a problem for a long, long time.  Humans thrive in warm periods.)  Gregory Benford ran a series of articles in reason suggesting hacks to cool the Earth if indeed it were burning up.

More importantly, if the Earth were burning up/freezing over, the solution wouldn’t be exactly the same, and wouldn’t so much resemble an excoriation of sins that the peasants committed when they tried to live in the same way as the elites.

Al Gore, whose carbon footprint is larger than Estonia’s and Moldavia’s put together, flies around the world telling people that they’re not supposed to drive cars, live in artificially cooled/warmed houses, have enough electricity to entertain themselves, etc. etc. etc.

The gist is “you’re sinful.  You’ve overstepped your bounds.  Go back, or cataclysm will follow.”

This is, like in all imperial religions, created and centered on the state (this is not new, btw.  Rome had one.) a religion that applies to the masses, not the rulers.  The rulers are special by virtue of being rulers.

And this part is what is right about If This Goes On.  Heinlein foresaw the theocracy quite well, and the impulse that drove it quite well.  His lens was just a little deformed by his perspective.

The book is still worth it and there are points that will make you stop with sudden realization.  For instance, when he says that the worst thing the Prophet did was steal history from the American people, so they had no idea their ancestors had been free.

Our children have no idea, either.  If you have kids, make sure you find them some stories from oh, the beginning of the last century.  And some movies, like 1766 1776  (this is why I’m not an engineer.  Digits do weird things between mind and fingers) and The Patriot, though flawed are worth it.  So is Independence Day by showing, in the end, American ingenuity coming through.

But all our kids have been taught are the sins of America and none of its glories.  And Heinlein was right about that part – if you don’t know your own history, if you don’t know the truth, your mind is already a prisoner of those who taught you the flawed history.

One of the mistakes Heinlein’s generation made was thinking the religious impulse went away when organized religion did.  It doesn’t of course.  As religion loses force, the state-as-religion moves in.  Of the two the second is probably the most harmful, as it wants to bring about a reality that simply doesn’t fit into the physical world.  No matter how much we squash capitalism, we’re not going to have an Earthly paradise.  (On the contrary.)  The paradise hereafter is each person’s concern and ultimately neither testable nor enforceable (not to say that some places and times haven’t tried it.)

The reason the book is still applicable, is that theocracy can exist outside conventional religion, and he nailed exactly how it works.

We keep wondering how things like journolist can exist, how people who are supposed to be writing the truth can justify lying in unison.  We keep wondering how people in the IRS can live with themselves when they’re persecuting the enemies of the party in power.

The answer is that they’ve been taught a distorted history.  In the light of that history what they’re doing is just and necessary.

Their minds were captured by the enemy – which is a toxic mix of statism and Marxism– and therefore they are no longer free.

The only way to return freedom to the people is to break the mental chains holding them.  This involves breaking the back of the media-entertainment complex.

We’re not there yet.  We might not be there for the rest of our lives.  The process takes time. (Another thing for which “If This Goes On” is useful.  You see the slow “de-indoctrination” of the main character, and how long it takes.)

However, it has begun.  And even in its beginning, its scaring the living daylights out of the statists, the state-worshippers, the enemies of freedom.

It is our duty as free men and women, to continue scaring them.  It is our duty to scare them as much as possible, and to free as many people as possible from their rotten doublethink.

The truth shall set you free.

UPDATE: If you feel a terrible need to listen to the accent that ate the world, here’s an interview with me.

Hurrah, Huns! Forward the Raiding Party! Der can be on’y one t’ousand! I’ll gi’ ye sich a kickin’!! (pre-digression: do we have a battle cry? I was tempted to write Deus Vult, but I know we aren’t all believers, let alone Christian. Perhaps, “let the deity/greater power of his/her choice sort them out!” would be more appropriate. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, of course.) This has been building for a bit. In that dark pit inside my skull. Some was sparked by comments here made weeks ago now. Some just came clear with the recent sound and fury over post-binary <del>sex</del>gender and Tor’s ongoing … oddness (more on that later).

We don’t all play by the same rules.

It’s obvious, really. You and I (and others of our ilk) hold with honor and deals made on a handshake between two honest people. We believe in working hard for our daily bread in the hopes of passing on a better world to our spawn. We believe in doing well by those around us, whatever their origins, and provided they aren’t outright antagonistic.

And this is reflected in our readin’ and writin’. Slightly outsized people – because who wants to read about the normal, especially when there’s dragons needing slaying (metaphorical dragons; all slaying of real dragons should be left to the professionals, who more likely than not will receive a late-night visit from a dark dragon in a black suit) – doing heroic things, often with high-powered implements of one stripe or another. Yeah, they get, well, perhaps an overgenerous helping of life’s slings and arrows, but they roll with it and fight back. Preferably within a few hundred pages or so. No really, no more than three books. <i>Seriously</i> no more than seven. More than that is just too many. Unless it’s good. Is it good? It is good, isn’t it?

*cough*

Anyway, we believe in behaving politely toward our fellow man. Or woman. Or, perhaps *cough* whatever gender applies. Others do not believe this, or anything approaching it. There are those who act – the truest indicator of belief – in a manner that betrays their assumption that narrative trumps reality. When you speak of facts (in your small-minded, modernist insistence) there is an instant check against the dominant narrative.

Is the government spending more money than it takes in revenue each year? This doesn’t mean mounting debt (well, it does, but you’re too unenlightened to understand the intricate realities of such enormous numbers, you ‘orrible little non-person, you); what it really means is that we’re leveraging our population to provide much-needed assistance to reduce income disparity among those victimized by systemic privilege. And it’s a <i>good</i> thing, you racisssss! When the rest of the world’s collective jaw drops at our chief executive bowing to foreign heads of state, it’s not because that’s a sign of weakness -akin to showing your belly to the alpha wolf – so much as a clever gambit in the on-going (and subtle, which you clingers just don’t understand) smart diplomacy, which will gain us the trust of potential allies in the war against the Man.

This can be seen in the ramp-up to every election cycle (which suggests that both of the major parties participate in this peculiar form of mass delusion) when <del>lying liars</del>politicians will say nearly anything to get into or remain in office. Following their success, they then work to stay in <del>power</del>office as long as possible, so as to maintain their opportunities for graft. I’m given to understand there are a few who actually do work to serve their constituency instead of fleece them, but it’s often tough to tell them apart.

The above is, perhaps, one of the more accessible examples, but it is by no means the most egregious. After all, politicians have to please <i>someone</i> to attain and then hold power. Much more common are those who buy into the pernicious lie of postmodernism without even the excuse of personal, material gains. Most of the useful idiots of the world (whatever their adherence) get only the feeling of being inside their particular circle. To know that their views are approved of by somebody, even if only in potentia.

As an aside, the Magic of teh Interwebs(TM) has provided a wondrous realm of sparkles and anonymity; a safe haven for tribes to gather and make war on each other without fear of spilling their own precious bodily fluids. In my darker moments, I pray for an Event that will give a non-fatal electric shock to anybody who posts something stupid online. In my more lucid moments, this notion makes me fear for the future of the species. End aside.

When objective reality intrudes on the narrative, it’s reality that must change. See Obamacare, Fast & Furious, or the continuing Benghazi attack aftermath. In more recent memory, see the moving goalposts in Larry Correia’s skirmishing with scifi establishment (how do you damn the Man when you <i>are</i> the Man?). It’s never about the arguments made, or the people who died; it’s about what they </i>mean</i> to truly important things like reproductive freedom or who has the power to circumvent the Constitution.

When somebody asks, “what difference, at this point, does it make,” whether an attack was caused by an obscure YouTube video or by deliberate malice aforethought, implicit is the guiding narrative that causes are unimportant next to how an event can be used to further a political ideology. If, whether for political purposes or simply because somebody couldn’t be arsed (what difference, at this point, does it make?), American citizens are left without sufficient protection in a hostile environment and rescue attempts are killed in the womb, it’s more important to use it for one’s own advantage than to do what is “right.”

After all, postmodernism decries such outdated concepts as good and evil. There is only, “what is right for me,” and “what is less right for me.” It’s far more important to feel good about your choices, whatever they are, than it is to choose something good in the first place.

Which aren’t the rules by which the rest of us typically operate. We (specifically those of us here) presume that physical reality imposes certain limitations that bind any philosophical framework we build to guide our choices. Just because we don’t like a facet of reality doesn’t mean we get to ignore it’s implications. Or at least, we assume that we ignore it to our ultimate detriment.

Part of joining civilization is the subordinating of certain individual natural rights (the right to kill people and take their stuff, for example. just off the top of my head) to some nebulous concept of a greater good. One of these is the right to be unconstrained in social interactions. Most civilized apes learn early on – with their mother’s milk, one might say – that our right to swing our fist ends at the next ape’s nose. And in verbal exchanges, as well.

What, then, do we do about those who refuse to play fair? How do we treat the barbarians in our midst? And can we do it without sacrificing our own integrity, or must we stoop to their level?

How about not arguing basic facts? Suppose you’re “discussing” the <del>coming ice-age, global warming</del> I mean, climate change. Let them have “man causes climate change,” and then inquire as to how much of a causative factor. Then make them show their work. Find a reputable source that claims humanity is the primal cause of global climate change across millennia. They can’t? Odd, that. Caveat: this method will only work with those without strong  – read: progressive – pre-conceived notions.

Beyond that, when dealing with those whose minds are closed and unreachable, is mockery the best policy? The Korreiakin emphasizes that he doesn’t argue on the internet to convince anybody, but to provide ammunition for those who agree with him, and garner a modicum of relaxation from the rampant foolishness of others. Do you think this is true? Is there any other way of dealing with vile progs whose minds are beyond the reach of reason?