Everything to do with the supply and demand of food, and household goods, had been mechanised so that the means in most general use everywhere in the Empire were vast depots, each one of which might supply a million inhabitants, needing no attendants at all. These were dismantled in favour of small suppliers, sometimes specialist suppliers, and the billions employed in this artificial industry were conspicuously happier than the idle masses. For a time. We had to take account of what is, so we know now, a law. This is that where the technology exists to accomplish a service or task or to supply a need, then if this is not used, because of humanitarian or other social reasons, there is no real or lasting satisfaction for the people in that sector. they all in the end, even if this realisation is delayed—sometimes deliberately, and by themselves, in efforts of self-deception—that their labours, their lives are without real purpose. And—in the end, if this is delayed—they fall victim to the same constellation of ills and general malaise. This is not to say that “invented usefulness” was not plentifully used; that it is not sometimes, in controlled areas, still used. As therapy, for instance; I will shortly describe an experiment on these lines.
Another phenomenon of the Dark Age was named, derisively and with unconcealed resentment, “pastimes of the rich.” Few of our better-off citizens did not acquire for themselves land, where they farmed in the old style: “pastimes of the rich” were mostly in the agricultural area. Innumerable people everywhere on our Colonised Planets left their leisure, their controlled and planned entertainments, regressed to a long distant past, with families working sometimes quite small plots of land, aiming at full self-sufficiency, but of course using the technical advances when this suited them. A favourite model was the ancient one of crops, animals, and workers as an interacting and mutually dependent unit. Such “farms” might not trade at all, but consumed what was grown. Others did set up trade, not only with each other but sometimes even made links with the cities where their products were in great demand—again with the rich. I do not have to say that the resentment against these “drop-outs” was due to envy. There was a time when it seemed as if there was not a male, female, neuter or child in our Empire who was not possessed of one idea: to get hold of some land, even criminal means, and to retreat into primitive production. This period produced its literature, a rich one, which is not the least curious of our literary side products. This phenomenon, at its height, was not confined to parts, or areas, of planets, but whole planets were taken over, and sometimes even conquered, with this idea in view.
Our Colonised Planets 19 and 22 were for several millennia agricultural paradises, with not a town to be seen and both consciously planned and developed to avoid the growth of villages larger than marketplaces for the exchange of goods. There were mass movements of mainly young people whose aim was only to reach either of these planets or to conquer a new one. These movements had all the characteristics of the “religions” that afflicted Rohanda in its period of decline and degeneration. To “live simply,” to “get back to nature,” seemed to nearly everyone the solution to all our new problems. But this phase, too, passed, when it became evident that these artificial schemes, these expedients, did not succeed in stilling the inner drive towards transcendence, both social and personal. There are still such farms, such ideas, in existence, but they have long been understood by everyone as pathetic regressions.
It was by then clear to us that we needed a drastic decrease in population. To state this is enough to raise the questions that then ravaged us all. Were we saying that the conditions of our existence in our Empire were to be governed entirely by economic factors? That the lives of our peoples should be judged solely by the levels of our technical achievements? Of course it goes without saying that when the question was put like this, the answer was that the numbers of populations, and their ways of living, had always been governed by economic factors: all that had happened was that famines, floods, diseases, had been replaced by the consequences of technical development. Nothing had changed: that was the argument. No need to torment ourselves now about questions about the purpose of life, the value of the individual, and so forth. Had we pondered and agonised over the results of natural disasters? Yes? Had this done any good? No? Then were we now prepared to agonise and torment ourselves over equally uncontrollable factors?
But that was the nub of the thing. We had seen ourselves, in bringing our technical achievements to such a pitch, as being in control, as exercising choice. Our thinking had been governed by this one idea. That we had abandoned chaos, and random decimation; that we had advanced towards conscious and deliberate controls.
To say that we were deliberately choosing to reduce our populations, that this was a choice, was simply not true, no matter how judiciously and carefully we were doing it. We been forced into this position by our economic growth that had gone naturally from step to step—upwards. As we had seen it.
This debate went on for a long time, throughout our Dark Age, in fact, and while we were actively reducing populations everywhere. And has gone on ever since, in one form or another.
Thus did our technological announce to ourselves, to other empires, to anybody interested, that what governed the coming into existence, or not, of an individual, was work. Or the lack of it. And where would that end? Were we to refuse life to more people than we had work for? Surely that was ludicrous, absurd. We needed agriculturalists—these could never, can never, be dispensed with. We needed technicians of all kinds to do with the production of synthetics and foodstuffs and household goods. We needed some craftsmen. And there was necessary a small governing and administrative class. On our Home Planet, it was estimated that we could do very well with half a million people. At our population peak, our Home Planet had two billion people.
Again, it had to be recognised and acknowledged that we were not in control of what we did, for we were forced into what we did. And that our social programming was always a matter of compromises, of adjustments, of balancing one force against another. We had a small area of choice, if that word could honestly and accurately be used at all.
This realisation affected some of our administrative people badly, resulting in depressions and psychological maladjustments of all kinds.
The populations everywhere, on everyone of our planets, were drastically, but carefully reduced; while the philosophical aspects of the matter were left, temporarily, to the intellectuals.
There was a very long period while this was being done when there were blocs of vast numbers of people who had no occupation, and for whom occupation was made. This fact, too, is relevant to what follows.
Meanwhile, there were extraordinary and bizarre contradictions to be observed everywhere.
The idea of ourselves, not only on Home Planet but everywhere, as people who had evolved beyond certain levels made it impossible for them to be asked to do some kinds of work.
I did not mention in the list of classes of work that had still to be done by people and not machines, some kinds of heavy manual labour for which we had not found technical substitutes. Without using force, it was not possible to get any of our peoples to undertake these. In the early heady days of euphoria when we were so effortlessly and successfully—it seemed—surmounting every kind of technical obstacle, abolishing one by one the different classes of unpleasant and degrading work—so we called it—intensive propaganda had gone into adjusting and setting the minds of populations accordingly. When we reversed, or were prepared to adjust, our thinking, it was too late. It is easy for a skilled administrative class to change the ways of thinking of populations, but not easy to do it fast—not without all kinds of social upheaval. We found ourselves in the ludicrous situation where, with hundreds of millions of “surplus” people, we did not know where to find enough ordinary labourers.