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 people 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.