Oath of Fealty
Aug. 31st, 2012 02:27 pmNovel
Oath of Fealty by Niven and Pournelle is a pleasant and interesting but not especially innovative novel about an arcology, Todos Santos, built as a designed, self-contained city just outside Los Angles, designed as a notional prototype for space-ship.
Political ideology
What I found interesting was that in retrospect there's political ideology that I just didn't notice at the time. A company is formed to build the arcology, and the main characters running the arcology are mostly senior staff. And in fact, the benign dictatorship works very well, enough that I didn't notice anything wrong.
But now I feel like the authors were nudging me in the ribs, saying "You know, maybe corporate officers actually are a better way of choosing community leaders than the current democratic system, eh, eh?"
And I'm not sure that's a good idea. I'm not sure how much difference it makes what role they were in: the decisive factor seems to be competent and hard-working people in charge, with power, and with the trust of the people in the city. In fact, if everyone in the arcology is a shareholder[1], electing the corporate officers isn't much different from electing a mayor, except that it's restricted to "official" residents.
The authors are right that the society they present probably is a better city plan than a typical American city. And corporations totally can be run for societal benefit hand-in-hand with success. The trouble is, most of the benign companies seem to concentrate on one specific thing (searching, fixing windscreens, producing collapsible nylon rucksacks, etc, etc) -- when we give over control over our police, housing, utilities, free speech, food, building, infrastructure, etc, etc, all to the SAME company, that seems exactly when it starts being forced to exploit its monopolistic position to screw us over.
In other words, yes, yes, everyone knows benign dictatorship works great. The difficult bit that political systems wrangle over solving is choosing leaders who are competent and benign.
[1] I think they are, it's a big coop? Although maybe libertarians use a different term for "coop" so it sounds less communist?
Oath of Fealty by Niven and Pournelle is a pleasant and interesting but not especially innovative novel about an arcology, Todos Santos, built as a designed, self-contained city just outside Los Angles, designed as a notional prototype for space-ship.
Political ideology
What I found interesting was that in retrospect there's political ideology that I just didn't notice at the time. A company is formed to build the arcology, and the main characters running the arcology are mostly senior staff. And in fact, the benign dictatorship works very well, enough that I didn't notice anything wrong.
But now I feel like the authors were nudging me in the ribs, saying "You know, maybe corporate officers actually are a better way of choosing community leaders than the current democratic system, eh, eh?"
And I'm not sure that's a good idea. I'm not sure how much difference it makes what role they were in: the decisive factor seems to be competent and hard-working people in charge, with power, and with the trust of the people in the city. In fact, if everyone in the arcology is a shareholder[1], electing the corporate officers isn't much different from electing a mayor, except that it's restricted to "official" residents.
The authors are right that the society they present probably is a better city plan than a typical American city. And corporations totally can be run for societal benefit hand-in-hand with success. The trouble is, most of the benign companies seem to concentrate on one specific thing (searching, fixing windscreens, producing collapsible nylon rucksacks, etc, etc) -- when we give over control over our police, housing, utilities, free speech, food, building, infrastructure, etc, etc, all to the SAME company, that seems exactly when it starts being forced to exploit its monopolistic position to screw us over.
In other words, yes, yes, everyone knows benign dictatorship works great. The difficult bit that political systems wrangle over solving is choosing leaders who are competent and benign.
[1] I think they are, it's a big coop? Although maybe libertarians use a different term for "coop" so it sounds less communist?