I was reading
this Matthew Ehret article about behaviourism and technocracy, and it struck me that these Consortium novels are an
in-situ exploration of the two-tier society envisioned by crusty old technocratic dudes like Bertrand Russell and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Russell laid out his grim worldview of a master/slave dominated order in the following terms:
“The scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researchers of psycho-analysis, behaviorism and biochemistry will be brought into play… all the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “cooperative” i.e.: to do exactly what every body else is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished will be scientifically trained out of them.”
For the elites in Russell’s dystopic world, a different role was envisioned:
“Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world state and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous, and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific techniques and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements”.
I can't help but think that it's looking like the splitting of humans into two different species. Literally - not figuratively. On the one hand, you have a deliberate dumbing-down of the majority (slaves), and an acceleration of capacity for the privileged few (the masters). And this bifurcation of human potential is
intentional. This is a key point the novels have brought home for me.
Is most human life is 'naturally' nasty, brutish and short? And are our minds 'by default' baroque, contradictory, and morose? Maybe - but only after the humans 'went for the gold' during The Fall. In more recent times, The Fall continues to repeat itself in each human life, through careful aeons of social engineering.
Most of us humans on the BBM live in a world of
manufactured lack as the abundance of this world is siphoned up by those living at the apex. So the class contrast in the books is jaw-dropping, in part because it paints a living picture of words of something that's so very real, and goes way back in time to The Fall. And the plot generally has the starting point of women protagonists in poverty (slaves), in comparison to the unimaginable wealth and power of the men (masters). This aspect of the narrative structure complements the Male Dominator God ascendant/destitution of Mother Goddess worship and the 'murdering of the feminine' mentioned in The Wave.
But although the women in the books are generally in dire straits, the the usual 'damsel in distress' trope is given a more modern twist. It's more like the damsels and the gentlemen save each other. They help to set each other free, to the extent that they are able. And love is not slaves overthrowing the masters in these books. It's not a global revolution. It is an intimate, interpersonal revelation.
The men are in significant distress, too - warped by their power, or the power they were initiated into. In this way, Le Carre is offering up a warning about the 'more, more, more' cultural logic that functions to hypnotize people into thirsting after power, money, fame, etc. 'More' is a hunger - the hunger of the Predator mind. And it is very interesting to see how Rocco dealt with his own version of this hunger - his particularly long and painful form of 'fasting'.
So in these series, Le Carre takes aim at this technocratic master/slave distinction, with love as the system-buster. It's all still quite mysterious to me. And I still don't really understand love - I think it's probably one of those concepts like time or space... very hard to conceptualize, let alone verbalize.
It's sort of like a higher order of energy (higher than 4D STS) that is called in by the Yin-Yang dynamism and starts correcting imbalances of the two protagonist Souls (often quite painfully) who are asking for it on some level. And the other Souls around them feel the effects. It's like a force from 'outside of time' shows up and sparks off an explosion of creativity, change and healing. Tantrums and all.
Anyways, Love (whatever it may be) dissolves or attacks or shrugs off the two-tier master/slave distinctions (archetypes) set up by the current would-be masters of the planet. Without this
idée fixe, the technocracy would have no foundation. So to my eye, the books like these are fighting the good fight on the level of information. Particularly when I think about these characters, and the dynamics at play in these novels, as fractals of divine archetypes or Faces of God.
@Mike made such a
good post about this recently.
So Le Carre sure has some good aim. By reading and understanding these stories, I've been given an emotionally-real 'lay of the land', but also a possible means of moving through the horrors this place, like a kinda 'map through the chaos'. Love in this sense is ALSO kinda like a road through very narrow, very dangerous, very confusing time. With these books, Le Carre's aim (love vs. technocracy) opens up the possibility for significant human transformation,
specifically in this technocratic transhuman moment. Despite how totally nuts the whole planet looks right now.
I felt a flood of information, feelings, premonitions that came true and were justified. Most often, these were disturbing, warning about the danger of feelings-thoughts. Thanks to them, I was vigilant in the family's life problems that arose, and so far everything has ended well. It turned out that I can quite trust my inner instinct. And it was not just intuition or logic, but an almost knocking down wave of premonitions and at the same time the knowledge that bad things are happening. It's hard to describe, but I didn't have it so strongly and clearly before.
