In the course of breaking into a house a murder was committed, almost accidentally, certainly without any sense of it mattering.
They were caught, and details of the cult were made public. Photographs of these young criminals, and of the room they used - in an empty house, decorated with pictures and models of Crafty Collie - were reproduced everywhere. When the doctors and psychiatrists examined the youngsters, it was found that their identification with the puppet was not affecting them more than half the time, for each had an ordinary personality, with its aims, beliefs, and standards, quite different from the other personality, which was a group one.
It was the girl who pointed out that only a month before Crafty Collie had been shown as tormenting and teasing a crazy old woman before knocking her down and leaving her apparently unconscious, reproved of course by his creator or other self, who always played the - ineffective - role of conscience to this secondary personality's excesses. Or successes.
The whole gang was tried, in a way not used before at that particular time, in an exemplary way: for child crime had become so prevalent that people were becoming more afraid of children than they were of adults.
The girl was in a special position as self-confessed, or self-proclaimed leader, for she was proud of her role as mother of this gang.
If Taufiq had been where he ought to have been, his role was to defend these children as victims of indoctrination. Whether this indoctrination was deliberate on the part of the authorities, or the result of ignorance, was not, could not be - he would have argued - any concern of the children, who had to suffer the consequences. In other words Taufiq, John, would have inspired a public campaign to get an extraordinarily lax and indifferent public to recognise where, when, and how the most sophisticated indoctrinational methods ever devised were being used on a population captive to them.
Further, if Taufiq had been able to fit into these events, his particular personality would have influenced these young people in ways not otherwise attainable. All had been neglected, none had been given any exemplar of worth to identify with. He would have been able to direct them in ways that would lead to their eventually gaining enough inner freedom to make real choices about what their lives would be.
But now, what one individual could have accomplished must be spread among several. I arranged that a group of lawyers not previously inspired to work of public responsibility take this case: they could be expected to do something at least of what was needed. As for influencing the youngsters, I saw to it that each one would come into contact with those who could help them, to some extent: a child-care officer with certain characteristics, a warder - three were sent to prison - a doctor, social workers.
The task with these young people took much longer than I expected or had planned for. It was not the most successful of my endeavours. The girl was not able to recover from a sojourn in prison calculated only to harden and deform: she came out a real criminal, soon made an emotional transfer to one of the extreme political sects which flourished then, and was killed in an exploit that could be characterised as part terrorist and part for gain. She was not twenty years old. Her rehabilitation had therefore to be reserved until after her entry into Zone Six.
INDIVIDUALTHREE (Workers' Leader)
A common type throughout the Century of Destruction in all parts of Shikasta, but the variation I am reporting on here was produced by the Northwest fringes and played a key part in the social structure. It was a stabilising one, and that this was so was felt by many as a bitter paradox, since their ideological birth was nearly always into the philosophy of transforming society completely, quickly, and into a sort of "paradise" not uninfluenced by the local "sacred" literature.
This individual was born into the chaotic conditions intensified by World War I. There was a small class living in affluence, but the bulk of the population was in poverty. He was an infant, a child, and then a young adult, among people who never had enough to eat, were cold, ill-housed, and often out of work. Of his immediate family three died of illnesses due to malnutrition. His mother was worn out by work and ill-feeling before she was thirty.
He lived, from the moment he came to consciousness of his situation, and that was early, in a state of anguished incredulity about the hardships of the people around him. This undersized urchin would wander the streets, upheld through cold, hunger, and the bitterness of injustice by visions and dreams. Each man or woman or shrunken child he passed seemed to him to have a double, another alternate being... what could be, what could have been... He would gaze, exalted, into the face of one, and address him silently: "You poor exhausted thing, you could be anything, it is not your fault... " He would watch his sister, a girl exhausted with-anaemia who had been working since she was fourteen, with no hope for anything but a future as narrow as her mother's, and he would be saying to her inwardly, "You don't know what you are, what you could be" - and it was as if he had put his arms around not only her, but the poor and the suffering everywhere. He cherished the twisted and the deformed with his gaze, he sustained the hungry and the desperate as he whispered, "You have it in you to be a marvel! Yes, you are a marvel and a wonder and you don't know it!" And he was making promises, fierce inward vows, to himself, and to them.
He simply could not believe that this extreme of deprivation was possible in a country - he saw the problem in terms of his own country, even his own town, for "the world" to him was names in newspapers - that described itself as rich, and headed a world empire.
He was informed beyond most of his fellows, because his father was a workers' representative, insofar as his hard life allowed him time and energy to be. There were books in his home, and ideas apart from those to do with the struggle to feed and clothe the family.
He was in the army five years, in World War II. His predominant emotion of marvelling incredulity that people could inflict such suffering on others, changed. He was no longer incredulous: as a soldier he travelled widely, and he saw the conditions of his upbringing everywhere. The war taught him to think in terms of Shikasta as a whole, and of interacting forces, at least to an extent: he was not able to encompass the dark-skinned in his compassion, not able to withstand the influences of his upbringing which had taught him to think of himself as superior. But he was also being affected, like everybody in or out of the army, by the general brutalising, coarsening. He accepted things as "human nature" which as a child he would have rejected. But he was full of purpose, dreaming of returning home to uplift others, rescuing, supporting, shielding them from realities which he felt himself able to withstand, though they could not.
When he got home from the army, he set himself actively to "speak for the working class," as the phrase then went, and he very soon stood out among others.
The period immediately following World War II was bitter, impoverished, grey, colourless. The nations of the Northwest fringes had shattered themselves, physically and morally. [SEE History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III. SUMMARY CHAPTER.] The Isolated Northern Continent had strengthened itself and was supporting the nations of the Northwest fringes on condition they become subservient and obedient allies in the military bloc this continent dominated. Wealth flowed from the military bloc into the Northwest fringes, and about fifteen years after the end of World War II there was a sudden brief prosperity all over the area. That was a paradoxical thing, in a paradoxical time, and deeply demoralising to populations already demoralised and lacking in purpose.
The system of economic production depended on consumption of every conceivable kind of goods by everyone - consumption of entirely unnecessary objects, food, drink, clothes, gadgets, devices. Every person in the Northwest fringes - as in the Isolated Northern Continent - was subjected, every moment of every day, through propaganda methods more powerful than any ever known before, to the need to buy, consume, waste, destroy, throw away - and this at a time when the globe as a whole was already short of goods of every kind and the majority of Shikasta's peop
le starved and went without.
The individual under consideration here was at the age of forty an influential person in a workers' organisation.
His role was to prevent the people he represented from being paid less than they could live on decently - this as a minimum goal; otherwise to get them "as large a slice of the cake as possible"; otherwise - but this aim had long since become secondary to the others - to overturn the economic system and substitute a workers' rule. He often contrasted how he saw things now with how he had seen them when he was a child and streets, areas of streets, no, whole cities, hungered and dwindled. This spurt of quite spurious and baseless affluence so soon to end, was intoxicating. Suddenly everything seemed possible. Within reach were experiences, ways of living he had never dreamed of as available to people of his kind. Not "a decent living wage," which slogan now seemed to him mean-spirited and cowardly, but as much as could be got. And this attitude was reinforced all the time, by everything around him. It was not that the working classes got anything like what the rich still got, but that millions were getting more than had seemed possible without some shocking overturn of society, or a revolution... In this atmosphere where there seemed no limit to what could be expected, there seemed no reason either why the workers of the nation should not exact retribution for the poverty of their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents, for the humiliations of their own childhoods. Revenge was a motive, clear for everyone to see.
But it was not in the nature of things that the Age of Affluence could continue; and the reasons were not to be sought in local conditions but globally - so far our friend did understand. He was still one who examined events less narrowly than most. He remained solitary. He was referred to as "an odd man out." Where groups of people are close, kept together by forces they combat by being defensive, the characteristics of individuals become affectionately regarded, are prized, made much of.
He was admired for standing for minority points of view. For being quiet, observant, reflective, often critical.
This was his role.
He had integrity.
He was proud of this, was still proud, but now saw that such words can acquire a double edge. He noted that people were very ready to congratulate him on this integrity of his. He had seen that people are willing to compliment others in the way these want to be complimented: an exacted flattery. "Integrity" was his perquisite.
Not the only one. Many good things came his way because of this position of his, as representative of the workers. But why not? Nothing compared to what came the way of "his betters" - as he had been expected as a child to call them, and had so stubbornly rebelled. And everyone did it. Did what? Nothing very much! Little crumbs and bits of this and that off the cake. What was the harm? For one thing, it could be said that these "perks" were not for him, personally, at all, but were an honour paid to his position and therefore to the workers. He would brood, secretly, about bribery, where it began and where it ended. About flattery as a food that sustained - and bought? He seemed to be spending hours of his time in definitions, self-assessments, doubts.
Nearly fifty, his life two-thirds gone, his children grown up. His children dismayed him. They cared for nothing but their own good, their pleasure, their possessions, their comfort. Criticising them, he told himself that this was no more than how parents always were with their children. (Rightly, he might mutter obstinately to himself, but not to his wife, who thought him prickly and difficult.) He was also proud of them, because by an inevitable process that he understood perfectly, they were a step up on the class ladder from him in this infinitely class-divided society; just as their children, his grandchildren, could expect to be a step higher still - but he was proud with a part of himself that he despised. He was self-divided, delighted they made demands on life that he was not able to believe even now were his due, while it was at the cost of rising in a society which he despised as much as ever he did.
But, criticising his children, he was criticising, too, the younger members of his own union - an entire generation. This was dangerous because treachery and disloyalty threatened. But he could not banish his thoughts. The incredulity that had been the strongest emotion of his childhood returned, transformed. How was it possible that people could forget as they did, taking everything that came their way as their due - thieves, snitching what they could whenever they could (and everybody knew it, including themselves), but they were even proud of it, regarding this pilfering and skyving as a sort of cleverness on their part, a way of outdoing the world - they were all careless, heedless, thoughtless, unable to see that this time of ease and even wealth was due to some transitory shift in the international economic juggling. Yet these were the sons and daughters of people so bitterly afflicted that they had gone to bed hungry more often than not, and were so stunted in growth that in looking at a crowd of working people it was a simple thing to pick out grandparents, even parents, who were often dwarves compared to their progeny. The history of the lower classes in this country had always been one of dire poverty and deprivation. Had they forgotten it? How was it possible? How could all this be happening?
Meanwhile, he was busy, in a hundred ways, sitting on committees, arguing with the employers, travelling and making speeches, attending conferences.
What exactly was it that he was doing?
Where did he stand now compared with his dreams for himself at the end of World War II?
He would find himself at a meeting, or a conference, with men, and women, whom he had known sometimes since he was a child. He would observe, hoping he was unobserved, feeling himself increasingly a stranger to them.
All his life he had polished and perfected a certain practice: that of keeping bright and close certain memories of his childhood as a conscience, or gauge, to measure present events against. After the war, beginning his work on the committees, there was a memory that was strong and alive, and kept so by what he could see around him. A cousin had sold vegetables from a barrow on a pavement. His fight to survive had been dreadful, and had worn him out early. He stood by the barrow all hours of the day and evening, and in all weathers, coughing, shivering, just holding himself together. But it was that stance of his which stuck in the mind - that of a schoolboy who has been knocked down by bullies so many times he knows the effort of getting to his feet will result only in his being knocked down again. It was a swaggering bravado, and every gesture said, You can't get me down, I'm a big man, I'm strong, I'm on top of circumstances... and so he swaggered there, the poor victim. Well, to the small boy who watched, it was terrible; and now, he was seeing all the same gestures, the bravado, in the people around him, and it was terrible again.
But came the times of ease, of "affluence."
When he was a youth, he had a clear knowledge of those opposing him, "the class enemy." Their characteristic was that they did not tell the truth. They lied. They cheated. When it was a question of defending their position, what they had, there was no trick or meanness they would not descend to. In any confrontation between them, those representatives of the "ruling classes," and the men who spoke for the struggling millions, they presented the bland calm faces of accomplished liars, who were proud of that accomplishment. He had seen himself, as a youth, a fighter armed with truth and with the facts, against these armies of thieves and liars.
And now? He would watch a good-humoured, smiling affable man, presenting a case, and remember...
They were not victors, he and his kind, not in any way, they were the defeated still, for they had become like their "betters." He, his kind, had been taken captive by everything they ought to hate, and had hated but had forgotten to hate. They had looked, earlier in their history, into the faces of their oppressors, who bullied and bluffed - and tricked; and had felt themselves superior, because they were honest, and stood on the truth. And now they, too, bluffed and bullied and tricked - just like everyone else of course. Who did not? Who did not lie and steal and filch, and take what he could grab? And so wh
y should they be any different?
What he was thinking was a sort of treason.
Thinking like this, not wanting to think like this, being ashamed of himself, and then telling himself he was right, and should hold fast to these thoughts, he had a breakdown. He was given leave for a year by concerned - and relieved - colleagues. He had been for months now sitting silently through deliberations of various kinds and then coming out with something like: "But shouldn't we get back to first principles?" Or: "Why do we tolerate so much thieving and crookedness?" Or: "Yes, but that isn't true, is it?" - and with a wrung face and the hot dry eyes of sleeplessness.
He went home to his wife, who was out all day working at a job which he thought was unnecessary and degrading to her. She worked because she said she couldn't make ends meet, but he told her that he earned enough to live in a way their respective parents would have thought luxury. Why shouldn't she make something of herself, something serious!
What, for instance?
Well, she could go to night classes. Or learn some real skill.
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