“What is it?” Will asked. “Some kind of electric oven?”
“No, the kilns are over on the other side of the village. This is the communal freezer.”
“In the old days,” Dr. Robert explained, “we used to lose about half of all the perishables we produced. Now we lose practically nothing. Whatever we grow is for us, not for the circumambient bacteria.”
“So now you have enough to eat.”
“More than enough. We eat better than any other country in Asia, and there’s a surplus for export. Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism. Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty. Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war.”
“Incidentally,” Will asked, “who owns all this? Are you capitalists or state socialists?”
“Neither. Most of the time we’re co-operators. Palanese agriculture has always been an affair of terracing and irrigation. But terracing and irrigation call for pooled efforts and friendly agreements. Cutthroat competition isn’t compatible with rice-growing in a mountainous country. Our people found it quite easy to pass from mutual aid in a village community to streamlined cooperative techniques for buying and selling and profit sharing and financing.”
“Even co-operative financing?”
Dr. Robert nodded. “None of those bloodsucking usurers that you find all over the Indian countryside. And no commercial banks in your Western style. Our borrowing and lending system was modeled on those credit unions that Wilhelm Raiffeisen set up more than a century ago in Germany. Dr. Andrew persuaded the Raja to invite one of Raiffeisen’s young men to come here and organize a cooperative banking system. It’s still going strong.”
“And what do you use for money?” Will asked.
Dr. Robert dipped into his trouser pocket and pulled out a handful of silver, gold and copper.
“In a modest way,” he explained, “Pala’s a gold-producing country. We mine enough to give our paper a solid metallic backing. And the gold supplements our exports. We can pay spot cash for expensive equipment like those transmission lines and the generators at the other end.”
“You seem to have solved your economic problems pretty successfully.”
“Solving them wasn’t difficult. To begin with, we never allowed ourselves to produce more children than we could feed, clothe, house, and educate into something like full humanity. Not being overpopulated, we have plenty. But, although we have plenty, we’ve managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to—the temptation to overconsume. We don’t give ourselves coronaries by guzzling six times as much saturated fat as we need. We don’t hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets will make us twice as happy as one television set. And finally we don’t spend a quarter of the gross national product preparing for World War III or even World War’s baby brother, Local War MMMCCCXXXIII. Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster. Ignorance, militarism and breeding, these three—and the greatest of these is breeding. No hope, not the slightest possibility, of solving the economic problem until that’s under control. As population rushes up, prosperity goes down.” He traced the descending curve with an outstretched finger. “And as prosperity goes down, discontent and rebellion” (the forefinger moved up again), “political ruthlessness and one-party rule, nationalism and bellicosity begin to rise. Another ten or fifteen years of uninhibited breeding, and the whole world, from China to Peru via Africa and the Middle East, will be fairly crawling with Great Leaders, all dedicated to the suppression of freedom, all armed to the teeth by Russia or America or, better still, by both at once, all waving flags, all screaming for Lebensraum.”
“What about Pala?” Will asked. “Will you be blessed with a Great Leader ten years from now?”
“Not if we can help it,” Dr. Robert answered. “We’ve always done everything possible to make it very difficult for a Great Leader to arise.”
Out of the corner of his eye Will saw that Murugan was making a face of indignant and contemptuous disgust. In his fancy Antinoüs evidently saw himself as a Carlylean Hero. Will turned back to Dr. Robert.
“Tell me how you do it,” he said.
“Well, to begin with we don’t fight wars or prepare for them. Consequently, we have no need for conscription, or military hierarchies, or a unified command. Then there’s our economic system: it doesn’t permit anybody to become more than four or five times as rich as the average. That means that we don’t have any captains of industry or omnipotent financiers. Better still, we have no omnipotent politicians or bureaucrats.
Pala’s a federation of self-governing units, geographical units, professional units, economic units—so there’s plenty of scope for small-scale initiative and democratic leaders, but no place for any kind of dictator at the head of a centralized government. Another point: we have no established church, and our religion stresses immediate experience and deplores belief in unverifiable dogmas and the emotions which that belief inspires. So we’re preserved from the plagues of popery, on the one hand, and fundamentalist revivalism, on the other. And along with transcendental experience we systematically cultivate skepticism. Discouraging children from taking words too seriously, teaching them to analyze whatever they hear or read—this is an integral part of the school curriculum. Result: the eloquent rabble-rouser, like Hitler or our neighbor across the Strait, Colonel Dipa, just doesn’t have a chance here in Pala.”
This was too much for Murugan. Unable to contain himself, “But look at the energy Colonel Dipa generates in his people,” he burst out. “Look at all the devotion and self-sacrifice. We don’t have anything like that here.”
“Thank God,” said Dr. Robert devoutly.
“Thank God,” Vijaya echoed.
“But these things are good,” the boy protested. “I admire them.”
“I admire them too,” said Dr. Robert. “Admire them in the same way as I admire a typhoon. Unfortunately that kind of energy and devotion and self-sacrifice happens to be incompatible with liberty, not to mention reason and human decency. But decency, reason and liberty are what Pala has been working for, ever since the time of your namesake, Murugan the Reformer.”
From under his seat Vijaya pulled out a tin box and, lifting the lid, distributed a first round of cheese and avocado sandwiches. “We’ll have to eat as we go.” He started the motor and with one hand, the other being busy with his sandwich, swung the little car onto the road. “Tomorrow,” he said to Will, “I’ll show you the sights of the village, and the still more remarkable sight of my family eating their lunch. Today we have an appointment in the mountains.”
Near the entrance to the village he turned the jeep into a side road that went winding steeply up between terraced fields of rice and vegetables, interspersed with orchards and, here and there, plantations of young trees destined, Dr. Robert explained, to supply the pulp mills of Shivapuram with their raw material.
“How many papers does Pala support?” Will enquired and was surprised to learn that there was only one. “Who enjoys the monopoly? The government? The party in power? The local Joe Aldehyde?”
“Nobody enjoys a monopoly,” Dr. Robert assured him. “There’s a panel of editors representing half a dozen different parties and interests. Each of them gets his allotted space for comment and criticism. The reader’s in a position to compare their arguments and make up his own mind. I remember how shocked I was the first time I read one of your big-circulation newspapers. The bias of the headlines, the systematic one-sidedness of the reporting and the commentaries, the catchwords and slogans instead of argument. No serious appeal to reason. Instead, a systematic effort to install conditioned reflexes in the minds of the voters—and, for the rest, crime, divorce, anecdotes, twaddle, anything to keep them distracted, anything to prevent them from thinking.”
The car climbed on and now they were on a ridge between two headlong descents, with a tree-fringed lake down at the bottom of a gorge to their left and to the right a broader valley where, between two tree-shaded villages, like an incongruous piece of pure geometry, sprawled a huge factory.
“Cement?” Will questioned.
Dr. Robert nodded. “One of the indispensable industries. We produce all we need and a surplus for export.”
“And those villages supply the manpower?”
“In the intervals of agriculture and work in the forest and the sawmills.”
“Does that kind of part-time system work well?”
“It depends what you mean by ‘well.’ It doesn’t result in maximum efficiency. But then in Pala maximum efficiency isn’t the categorical imperative that it is with you. You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think first of human beings and their satisfactions. Changing jobs doesn’t make
