The History Of The World (Ch.13b)

Ch.13b

The History Of The World

Janus pushed aside his manuscript.  What was the point?  Where was it all going?  He had studied the whole known history of the human race and he understood it as clearly as it was possible for anyone in the present to understand the distant past.  He felt there was no more to learn.  Further study would lead him further round in circles.  He knew everything that was essential about the past.  He had seen the increasing complexity of societies and economic relationships which became more specialised until the present helpless position of man who did not even understand that each small task he took on was for and how it connected with all those other small tasks which everyone else performed.  He had seen the drive of the leaders to build something which would last and be strong and be bigger than what went before.  Greed, self preservation and vanity had shaped the great societies, essential to man, and yet they made his life a misery, a slave to whichever or whoever’s system dominated.  Sometimes the systems had been controlled by one man, or a family or a group of leaders, or an elite or class.  Sometimes they had been dominated by no one individual or group.  The system had outgrown direction or control and become bigger than any political or social group.  The whole world and much of space now lay under the unrestrained tutelage of such a system.  It had outgrown its makers and finally come to enslave mankind.  For those who tried to outrun the system or rebel against it there was no hope.  Emperors and Kings, small countries, the Communalists, Nationalists, Maneddonists, Creadds, dropouts, drug addicts and Dwarfs had all tried in their times to control, or stop or resist the system, but all of them had been washed aside as the floodwaters broke.

Janus had written his sample histories, he had even published them, against all the odds and he had earnestly hoped they would make people listen and think, to try to stop the tide.  But the readership statistics returned by his console from Vidbase showed a predictably small readership so far.  No one had time to read history in this age of commerce and numbers.  There were a few drawn to it who searched the Databanks faithfully for scraps of wisdom and true knowledge.  His books had not really been advertised sufficiently to impact upon many people’s lives.  Just a few quick book reviews on the current issues, Info packs hungrily reviewed and forgotten by that insatiable public who wished to keep up to date.  Once his book reviews were two months old, or even a month, they would be out of the info packs and his work would be consigned to the inner recesses of the Vidbase computer network, never to be found again except by those few faithful trawlers who continually reviewed them for anything of quality from the past.  There was so much choice, that soon everything was forgotten, unless it made a massive impact in the first two months of publication, in which case it would enter the continual revolving “Hall of Fame” database section where literature “classics” were kept together always on  offer to those who wished to choose “classics”.  His would never appear there.  There was no market for history, not his kind of history anyway, the honest kind.

The process of writing and publishing his histories had left Janus feeling quite empty.  Something he had previously had a passionate interest in had grown in him and demanded that he produce it.  The ideas and the knowledge had not let him rest until they were finished and published, banished into the Vidbase.  Now they were gone he no longer had the same interest in them.  He cherished them of course because they were part of himself and his life and history was the background to the grey dull commercial  world which enslaved humanity today.  But he now questioned why he had spent so much time on  explaining the past, particularly to an audience which had  neither the time nor the inclination to hear.  Why had he spent so much of his precious time explaining about the Creadds, the great struggles between Marta and Gallanol, the forward thinking reunited Gallanol of Lew Duneid, the Communalists and the rise of the present International Political and Economic Framework.  It seemed to him that he had only done it for himself.  His knowledge and his vision would affect very few people and they would hardly affect the System of the world in any way.  That was why the system was so happy to receive his works into their data banks.  The System was only made worse by all the knowledge people were encouraged to create.  The knowledge was deposited creating a greater body of knowledge for future generations to read and absorb.  Little of it would stick.  The system could accept works from people who wished to destroy or change it because it knew that they would fail to get their message across, and they would all the more fail to change the system in any direct or practical way.  The system had carved itself in stone.  It could use anything which refined it and made it work better, more efficiently, or made it grow.  Anything which sought to change it however or affect its course was merely absorbed by it.

Earlier he had been attempting to continue a chapter in his current project – a cursory survey of the modern social political and economic system.  It was more of an effort to write than a history because it combined information and thoughts from many disciplines and subject areas.  Janus, being of an artistic nature and disliking any academic quibbling was not attempting to make an academic survey of  modern life.  That would have been too dry.  No one would have wanted to read it and he would have resented the long months it would have taken to write.  Such a book would have been out of the question.  He had wanted to write a short book containing a critical overview of the modern system, outlining its failures and weaknesses and the wretched state of mankind, which he believed to exist.  He wished then to present some ideas for a more humane and enlightened future. The book was proving a difficult one to write, partly because he kept returning to his other projects – the paintings, and drawings and the novel he was slowly writing, and partly because of a growing disenchantment and boredom which threatened to slow down the production of all his various works.  He had written a couple of sentences on the subject of the effect of  the increasing educational burden on the incidence of  marriage and raising children, but the subject required some general evidence and he had run out of things to say and he was bored.  He had been daydreaming now for some time and had finally decided to put the manuscript aside.  He needed to rest and let his mind wander even though he had achieved very little so far.

The big problem with this particular book was that he had not decided how the system should be changed for the better.  He supposed he would have to start writing and see which thoughts came up.  Writing for Janus was a process of mind wandering from one subject to another in which new ideas often cropped up unexpectedly and led him in new directions.  Whatever he wrote could easily be changed, or be taken out and put somewhere else.  Eventually he would knock it into shape and try to have it published.  He wondered whether he could get a Vidbase publishing company to publish it.  His criticisms of modern society would probably not interest very many of them who tended to prefer more escapist and predictable styles of literature.  Educational and academic books aplenty were published but this would not be considered to have a good academic basis, being merely someone’s opinion and not based on logical analysis.  He would have to get through to some publishers with a broad imagination, ideally someone who had a healthy contempt for modern society.  His history books contained his own views on much which was also, or would be, mentioned in this book but he suspected the publishers of those books may not be interested in the new book.

Janus knew what his problem at the moment was.  He had been spending too much time on his own engrossed in projects, studies and relaxation.  Indeed he hadn’t been doing anything else for a few months – the occasional journey on the network, observations of people in bars and walks around the city had been his only activities outside his room.  He had done this to keep in touch with people and to gain inspiration and ideas.  He had watched a lot of Vidscreen.  That had been his only friend in all that time and had kept him in touch with the rest of humanity.  Janus was a tough self contained person and had been able to retire from more direct human life when he gave up working.  He had known that he could cope with isolation much more than most because his projects were more fulfilling to him than the people he had known before.  He had promised himself that he would do something about his isolation if it became necessary, but he had lasted for a remarkably long time before he began to crack.  He had surprised himself.  But in the interests of productivity and concentration he had opted for this freedom from distraction and it had worked.  The amount of work he had managed to produce over the months had fully justified his isolation.  Janus’s new doubts were that he might have wasted his time in producing so much that would hardly be read or viewed by anyone.  What purpose was he really achieving?  Had he furthered his own cause in any way?  Had he helped in any way to change the system?  It appeared at this moment that perhaps he had not changed anything or done anything.  That depressed him and contributed to his dissatisfaction.