quaere verum [translation]

I've discovered recently how months of unemployment cause one to fill up free time with all sorts of interesting activities, to the point that each day is a full schedule of enrichment of some sort.

Then some small employment comes along. Not that I mind employment (and in fact appreciate it quite a bit, especially if any of my employers are reading this!), but I have to completely rearrange my schedule to accommodate it: maybe I can't go to the movies with friends as often as I was, or read online news with the same depth of research, or devour the number of books per month that I was churning through before.

So the scheduling can be challenging. There are some things, though, that make it a lot easier to triage, like when I have a chance to see Kim Stanley Robinson do a reading in Seattle.

University Bookstore was kind enough to invite KSR to read shortly after his Forty Signs of Rain was released. I've been a big fan of KSR for several years now, but had never been able to see him in person, so this was quite exciting (not to mention the excitement over a new book!). I bought the book, wolfed it down in a couple days (becoming quite disappointed toward the end as I realize that it's the first in a trilogy), then attended the reading.

I was struck dumb. The man is even more brilliant in person than I could have ever hoped, as inspiring an orator as he is a novelist. Some points stood out for me in his reading, including:

Americans tend to view taxation as a form of theft, taking away their hard-earned monies in exchange for social services that have no clear personal benefit. Yet there's another form of theft that goes completely unnoticed, as pointed out in a sampling of one of the passages KSR read from:

"What's the average income?" Edgardo asked. "Thirty thousand? [...] Call it thirty, and what's the average taxes paid?"

"About ten? Or is it less?"

Edgardo said, "Call it ten. So let's see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of [your third] to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party." He grinned at Frank and Anna. "How stupid is that?"

[...] "It's a matter of what you can see," [Frank] suggested. "You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it's given to you. You have it. Then you're forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you've created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books."

— Forty Signs of Rain pgs.74-75 (italics mine)

Both of KSR's books also discuss how scientific methods are a strange fit for a capitalist society--much work done for science is on a completely voluntary basis, such as work for a scientific journal which doesn't even offer a complimentary subscription to the journal in exchange for one's labor. As a result, science is practically at odds with capitalism, and KSR takes it one step further: science is actually the true power underlying government in our modern systems.

You'll have to read his books if you want to discover the structure of his argument on this point, but after thinking about his suggestion, I find a different light colors the current headlines about the Bush administration trying to quell scientific inquiry and process in their policies. It's a coup d'état occurring right before our eyes, and no one cares.

Last updated by eric Sun Jun 27 13:18 2004 | omission | link