Shikasta (20 page)

Children were identified with these ‘unreal' figures, which could never be taken for anything but dolls, or puppets, and which were particularly useful to take as secondary selves, simply because they did not demand the levels of self-criticism which would be demanded by creatures like themselves, who were ‘real'.

A certain group of children, much neglected by parents, who were all working, and who left them almost entirely to themselves, developed a private world in which each one of them
was
this puppet, the half-grown dog with a typically flattering name, Crafty Collie. These children lived more and more inside the world they had created, taking, like their exemplar, to small ways of trickery, cheating, and lying – this in a motivated, patterned way, for all they had to do every
afternoon was to press a button in order to see a programme for their alternative selves to follow. They took to more intricate crimes. Soon they had a leader. She was female, a bright resourceful child of eleven years. She it was who kept them together, who made sure they watched the succeeding episodes of the ventriloquist's dramas, and who translated into action the messages of Crafty Collie. This went on for three years, while the children became young adults, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Their crimes, at this time when nearly everybody engaged in some form of cheating or stealing, were not remarkable. They stole from shops, broke into houses, kept themselves supplied with money and goods. After every escapade, the group would gather in a ritual where what they had done was played out in terms of their pattern.

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 recognize 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 characterized 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.

INDIVIDUAL THREE
(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 stabilizing one, and that this was so was felt by many as a bitter paradox, since their ideological birth was nearly always in 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 his 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 brutalizing, 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 demoralizing to populations already demoralized 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 people starved and went without.

The individual under consideration here was at the age of forty an influential person in a workers' organization.

His role was to prevent the people he represented from being paid less than they could live on decently – this was a minimum goal; otherwise to get them ‘as large a slice of the cake as possible'; otherwise – but this aim had long since been 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 to 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. Criticizing them, he told himself that this was no more than how parents always were with their children. (Rightly, he might utter 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.