Ludendorff Wakes: 1916's 1984--WorldWar Infinite

An insistence on moral calculus and Hard Choices That Had To Be Made (via computer) means there's plenty o' big explosions. Everyone agrees it's self-defense, and thus each bloc is in fact helpless to conduct war any other way. The elites' fear of life (because it leads to death) during peacetime generates a love of death during war. The System brings death to those on the outside--but can't provide life for those within it, despite its promises of immortality by being part of something bigger or building a better world to our grandchildren's grateful remembrance. No matter which human side believed it'd "won," it's the machines who win--humans surrendered themselves to destructive as well as productive machines. The soft, loving, fearing, hating creatures began think like their creations and created military structures that came to agreements that absolutely nobody on any side wanted. Bloodless, sanitary technology let officers abscond their responsibility. Machines are made to be used and their use is their purpose and justification--even the Button is designed to be pushed. The dead deserved to die because they did, and a tool inherently carries the obligation to use it--as its creators realized once it was too late. Officers (especially East Asian ones) became as dehumanized as the victims they dehumanized. The attitude was, "if there are two Oceanians and one Eurasian left alive, we win!" Anyone who runs is an Eastasian, anyone who stands still is a well-disciplined Eastasian (and they asked for violence, and they got it). WWIII had called for fanaticism without fanaticism, since one couldn't openly pretend the Other Guys were fundamentally different from you--and they switched every month anyway. The upper strata may still think that Ours is the only right way of doing things and that it's the other blocs who're forcing their weird views on their hapless subjects--but this is all harder to sustain outside the megabunkers. Argentina and Brazil get lots of Eurasian dough, and the French Bloc is likewise trying to carve out its own path with Latin America. Religion--war's only cause, to some--had been erased or suborned, but war still happened--and between maximally rationalistic Systems, no less. All terrorism and conflict must therefore be caused by the enemy du jour: "Eurasia underlies all the unrest that is going on. If they weren't engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn't be any hot spots in the world." Each of the three blocs undermined the rest by encouraging rebellion, and proxy war turns the fights ethnic by 1984. For the ideologues, the firebombing finally got rid of a lot of those flying buttresses that showed everyone that those medievil cavemen were better architects than the swell-browed Romans, let alone the machines that out-Antikythera'd the Antikythera Device. Most notably, "strategic hamlets" fusing village and military for total control of the peasantry came to be seen as the perfect unit of society. The need for technological strength and superiority only gives you arms races.

Around 1977 the world sank into a perpetual yet flip-flopping struggle between the three Systems and also the increasing rebellions against the blocs' existence themselves. Military budgets cut into socioeconomic expenditure and aren't constructive: social spending is there now only to prevent insurrection and keep the bloc war-ready. Patriotism and nationalism are extended to the bloc as a whole, despite the endless double-crossing within and between blocs. Eurasia and East Asia aren't democratic, but neither is the Anglo technocracy any culmination of any Great March to Liberty that started at Runnymede and Plymouth Rock. Anglo voting is mostly to prevent people from protesting. Eurasia and East Asia look very Kerberos, Britain is a Trainspottingesque factory-fortress, Russia had a multi-Holodomor mid-70s, and the US is pretty bombed-out; French industry has ground down, smaller dialects are being crushed, and they're expected to breed for the great Eurasian armies. Frustration is channeled into warfare and fickle alliances; enemies don't just have to be defeated, they have to be converted and love our System. But constant war isn't actually all that good for keeping power or filling one's pockets. The blocs simultaneously desire war and peace, and the two start blurring into each other: conflict is actually intensified by the total lack of ideological difference. Eurasia and East Asia use farmer-soldiers to fill the besieged borders (Han in Xinjiang, Japanese and Koreans in Manchuria, Javanese and Luzonese in Sumatra, Borneo, the Moluccas, and West Papua), Russians and Cossacks in Siberia.  Mach-4 bombers dogfight over Tokyo, Vancouver, Constantinople, Bloemfontein, Recife, Sydney (or at least the non-skyscrapers left over by the missiles).

The world has fewer pelicans, falcons, lions, and condors; Central America, the Ixil Triangle, El Petén, Culiacán, the Bajío, and Durango are soaked in new generations of parathion, DDT, paraquat, aldrin, dieldrin, and Nemagon (though the trend for identical, unblemished fruits was over even before WWIII): Miracle Rice and paraquat are stolen off of trucks, contaminating whole valleys. The people are immunocompromised, allergic, dangerously overmedicated, and full of poison and genetic pollution, with Richard Berman types telling them it's all okay in the name of Science; the bees are already declining. The technocrats try and claim that pollution only kills off rats and birds that are so numerous that they're automatically pests. There's no more forest soils to be obtained by removing the trees--the jungles ravaged by being "brought into line," the soil degraded, swarms of bugs whenever they try to wipe out sparrows (vaguely-hippieish Japan, Germany, and California avoid this)--so there's (technocratic) wise use, restoration, cleanup, and conservation--a "sustainable," less-wasteful (yet still eternal) economy. Wilderness is legally sanctioned, letting people see themselves as members of a biotic community--you have to respect other species; whaling is increasingly "managed." More national parks, however, here means less attention to logging and pollution outside. There's more billboards and dams (and dam breaks), and manual labor is still cheaper, withstanding wars and energy crises (1972-6, 1981). Oil prices had cratered, with the three blocs having to take over the extraction because the existing infrastructure's not worth it for the Third World.

The 80s pushed for derivatives, hailed as the first element of post- or superhuman economics: eventually perfume futures, tourism, debt, students, and orchid species will be dollarized, turned into a financial instrument, divisible into particles of risk derived from the original investment for your portfolio. As in OTL, nature's valued in terms of the all-consuming market--"environmental services" of clean air and water, good soil, edible organisms (so a sufficiently large quantity of money could thus make up for the elimination of a particular species or biome, again replacing nature). A job or two isn't enough to keep one off the streets anymore--wages no longer keep pace with production and deskilling moves Oceania toward deindustrialization. The economy's not yet being dismembered for the sake of the "Haves and the Have-Mores" profiting from mergers and layoffs, pension theft, and outsourcing--and Oceanians are decades away from the idea that the rich have Made It and should be catered to even harder. Regulatory capture socializes the costs and privatizes the benefits, public-private partnerships turning to war and power-seeking. Profiteering is increasingly oppressive and economic planning increasingly lumbering. As OTL, the "corporations" turn rebelliousness against the system in favor of astroturfing to sell cigarettes, cheap labor, pills, lumbering, mining, chemicals, oil wells, and beagle crucifixion. After all, "everything on earth ... is radioactive and always has been": the leaky powerplants are not only natural but eternal. In Buenos Aires you go to the camps if you have Freud and Lacan on your shelf, since he's a Judeocommie undermining Greco-Christianity, like Einstein and Marx. Mainstream churches still dominate the US, and there was no Baptist coup: there's no creationism--but also no room for things that aren't creationism. Like opposition to eugenics.

Oceania's top technocrats are threatened enough to create Stosselite "Clear Thinking" gangs against the rebellious youths and their obscurantist belief that "culture" (i.e., other cultures) has something to offer. Stewing in their own successes (real or imagined) since the 1890s has badly barbled their minds: everyone who isn't them is a stupid, abusive, fanatic, fallacious, schizophrenic, racist, gullible, backwards, Himalayan dupe who refuses to see the obvious. There's secularist car bombings like OTL Turkey. There's a mounting rage over opposition and people insisting on finding their own meaning in life: can't they see that the System's working for a Heaven on Earth that'll make any Scriptural promise empty, populated by "a being beside which the mythical divinities of the past will seem more and more ridiculous"? All we've worked for is threatened from within as well--and haven't we given the poorest rubber-tapper more choice than the wildest Bourbon dream? The past is dead and its inhabitants stupid. Anyone outside of their (narrow, close-helmed) worldview is in fact on some obstinate, gratuitous lark! Semmelweis's story is turned around by the technocrats to say that you can never question science (but it can reverse itself at will, like a bad boyfriend). Lewis Powell runs surveillance of any reporter, priest, bureaucrat, academic, artist, or scientist posing a "threat to production" and eventually you can't complain about the food. Reliance on an ideology of science (rather than accepting a dialectic between theory and empiricism) quickly undermines the practice of science itself. There's lots of fake labs and councils to certify whatever the chemical industry wants and anti-Loraxes--but as usual there's a contradiction: some see cancer as a reason to end the tobacco and cocaine trades, others see the science as the start of an Eurasiatic plot.

Philosophy and history are dull, Columbus's voyages still having the mermaids edited out: history's an upward March of Good Guys, with Wyclif and Newton rebaptized as Enlightened (and thus precursors to the Managers) before their time. They still swallow the recycled Victorian stories of Kersey Graves, nude, retarded peasants, Alexander Hislop, triune brains, Hypatia, Hero of Alexandria, Columbus and Magellan's the flat Earth, Oxford debates, droit du seigneur, etc. Any objection is just a limbic misfire. In Oceania's books "feudal" slavery was ended when the First Technocrat (Abraham Lincoln) defeated the French- and medieval-loving Southron aristocrats (and also the "extremist" Transcendentalist William Lloyd Garrison). The "Burning Times" have now hit 12 million and been extended from the late 3rd to the late 18th centuries. Theologically, what technocracy offers is Protestantism minus the Christianity. Past technocrats are in fact purged the same way the PRI discarded the technocrat Díaz in favor of a "Revolutionary Family" underpinning its technocracy (regardless of the fact that they literally fought wars against one another): some ascendant technocrats are even saying the industrial combines' science might be suspect. Actual history's complicated and almost smut--Guénon and Couliano and Eliade, the philosophes' crypto-Protestantism, the real Bruno, the shameless astrologer Cecco d'Ascoli, and Newton--and, worse, different ways of living and thinking and doctoring and farming, ideas and institutions that shaped actions. History's still used by the technocrats for its examples of philosophical conflict even as the historians themselves admit it's all totally wrong.

WWIII produced a crisis beyond the mounting deaths: you get your bog-standard atomic eschatologies and more and more agree that you can't afford to be smug after overconfidence eliminated dozens of cities--that we all got in OTL, after Hiroshima and Monte Cassino and Korea and Operation Ranch Hand and Silent Spring. But more importantly for TTL, you can't say there's no more darkness to be fought. The radical hegemons may still insist that the war broke out because it's "Man's dark side" spurting up--the witches, feminists, art historians, and exorcists reemerging as postwar Pied Pipers leading us to a New Dark Age. The futurists' language of scientific marvels and miracles unconsciously slid into debased "signs and wonders." Spiritualism is in fact on the rise, with Ghostbusters tech (that produces tiny--but consistent--responses). The System wants gelded, lobotomized, trotting poodles, and there's no right wing to redirect all that dissent into astroturfed rebelliousness.. Oceanian science is defined as moral and democratic unlike Eurasia's "political" condemnation of Pauli rings and Bell's theorem as insufficiently materialistic: but as the effects of various chemicals, industrialism, GMOs, and bargain-bin-style medicine are becoming apparent much earlier TTL, complaining can't be so easily slammed as "hippie science," making the "dirty-cop" whitecoats even more desperate than OTL. In the name of "defending science" they have to ignore its results

Biopsychiatry and neural architecture are pretty good, but hindered by how they're used; animal communication is ahead of ours (if you talk you're a mini-person, if not, you're ambulatory furniture); there's plenty of megacolliders, dogs aren't really feeling anything when they yelp/piss themselves/visibly beg for the cosmos of pain they've been turned into to stop, and biology is ahead of ours. The top technocratic networks hope for a techno-miracle to bail them out of the latest techno-disaster, with factory-scale labs to force the issue: a single shelf of a good European library is still worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia--why, if the Third World had any knowledge of merit we'd've accepted it! Geneticists still swear we'll soon have free-gasoline trees with pipeline roots. Some scientists are even proposing barbarian herbalism like using Catharanthus and Camptotheca against cancer! Monogamy's still a headscratcher to the elites, "because bonobos." There's less race science than OTL--nobody accusing David Duke's opponents of being pro-woman PoMo Lysenkoists. Their response to any challenge still boils down to "I'm a middle-aged white male--why isn't anybody listening to me?!" and there's still racists running journals, however. Public transit is bleeding-edge and math and physics are elaborate and subtle, with post-Minkowski number fields where 2+2=5 and "spaceless" astrophysics. Statistics is turned to the service of predicting crime, monitoring anyone for pre-crime. There's plenty of design and creative jobs--no burnt orange-dark yellow-pea green paisleys, just Art Deco propaganda during "wartime" and travel ads during "peace." It's a geostrategic century, so atlases are huge, beautiful, and cutting-edge.

Sophisticated reinterpretations of the System (as opposed to ways to better humanize it) are suspect. However, more and more recognize that technocracy is a very specific political project in a particular political context--not the default for Man. Heck, one central founder of their philosophy admitted that its "most important" defect "was that nearly all of it was false" from the roots on up. Some awareness of race, gender, environment, and history increasingly escapes containment within university walls. Information isn't controlled but stripped of context: euphemism (going way past liquidation, transfer, defense, dynamism, overcoming, release) is a code that only the Summit can understand. History is ignored or labeled irrelevant rather than rewritten. Passive voice and talking points replace life. Power is nothing like what we'd recognize today: the principle is that optimization, surveillance, and control will eventually extend to everything living, politics biologized and the biosphere technologized. The goal of Procrustics is self-regulation--a system that doesn't exist, no hidden rulers, just directed information flows and masses to be shaped. Society as an "organic machine" allows for surveillance against discontent. Just as history gets more Whiggish the more it's summarized, ideas implode as they're shortened--who needs propaganda when you have bumper-sticker thinking? The Peter Principle creeps into the hierarchy of workplace, village, town, district, and provincial mandarins. The technocracy becomes morally bankrupt: lower infant mortality isn't enough--or even just illusory, data becoming grossly misrepresented and Lomborg Ratios approaching 1 (where 100% of facts are untrue). Safe, tame "dissenters" call for freedom--as something that can be bought, as a product with a cash value. 

They'd tried to ensure that there was nothing to rebel against, no workhouses or slave-factories, everyone happy and healthy and even competing within the meritocracy to increase efficiency and efficacy, but rebellion's also influenced by relative deprivation--and boy is it! PermaWar means work hours grow ever-longer as civilians exist only as cogs supplying the battlefields. Everyone must report suspicious behavior from neighbors, friends, coworkers, parents, children, spouses. It's illegal to photograph farms, factories, bridges, or tall buildings. Each System manned the barricades of Civilization at home and abroad: the "state" says it's tamed its barbarous subjects' orgy of violence and misery, bringing peace and prosperity. However, they just ended up offshoring war and oppression, then patted themselves on the back that they've ended cat-burning and tribalism (proving past a P of 0.01 that the rest of the world are insane savages who simply haven't been taught to respect women and eschew violence somehow takes a very racist turn very quickly). Peaceful development TTL is also built on murdered revolutionaries and Mayans. Once war and peace blurred into each other there came indefinite detention without charge and outside any law. Life's now something to be endured and people are sick of just inhabiting the world. The tension between old rights and the demands of constant "war" and mixed "state" "capitalism"--between Man's divinity and meliorism vs. being cannon fodder--cannot last. Not only are the problems insurmountable, but there weren't even supposed to be any insurmountable problems, with all humanity's labor and ingenuity at your fingertips!

China, Vietnam, Portuguese Africa, Algeria, and the Caribbean had been turbulent since before WWIII. 1983/4 rolls around with increasing protest, then democratic takeovers, then rebellion or "restoration and reclamation" by the unindoctrinated ward and district bureaucrats excluded from the Apex of power. The rebels start admitting there can be problems that no amount of human ingenuity and labor can overcome. Smash-happy New Swing Riots demand that humans be put before technology--that people are beings who live and need, not obstacles to a vision of perfection. The 70s saw a political breakdown within the technocracies (like in OTL Peronism)--a decoupling of the non-party that had tried to span the entire spectrum (mostly by excluding anything else from acceptability). Perhaps the countryside's heard the phrase "rural idiocy" one time too many, or the pistoleros killed one tomato-grower too many--by the time the rulers formally announced that they don't need to know anything about what they're criticizing, everyone's risen up. There's an enormous diversity on the left and theists--not captured by Soviet or fundamentalist orthodoxies respectively. There's a producerist right wing resenting the "regulators" and "takers" as the economic crisis becomes permanent--but religion, Communism, humanities, ecology, narodism, anarchism, nihilism, and fatalism are more influential than Angry White rebellion. There's as much Islamosocialism as conservative revivalism: the question is, will the Mideastern revolutionaries purge, converge--or something else?

Space Madness! Anthropocentrism actually undercuts itself: we're playing God, but our species is the mere husk out of which true Material God will emerge. Our lineage is the goal-bearer of all cosmic evolution, spreading life to other worlds, whose destiny it is to be fertilized. Man's the culmination of the cosmic process, ranking as God by learning everything, "all matter and forces ... in all universes" given over to life (meaning Homo superior a'course). Man has a capital M, but its input is not required: we can survive only by becoming the dominant species, and that requires discipline and dominance! Homo astronauticus was supposed to "take up the sacred fire, and stride forth into space as the torchbearers of Life ... [on] the barren dusts of a million billion worlds ... Slag will become soil, grass will sprout, flowers will bloom, and forests will spring up in once sterile places. Ice, hard as iron, will melt and trickle into pools where starfish, anemones, and seashells dwell--a whole frozen universe will thaw and transmogrify, from howling desolation to blossoming paradise. Dust into Life; the very alchemy of God." A world of towns, crops, and asphalt can replace the biosphere given enough technology, and abolishing life "is simple hygiene." And these nutterbutter fantasies are all declared obvious--as scientific as gravitation: you can't say it's a mad infatuation, it's science! You just need some foresight! Knowing the intrinsic order of things lets you speak for the whole cosmos. Our destiny is to lead all species on the same journey until we saturate all the planet with intelligence, a self-apotheosis--to completely become the material world, then shed it. Earth's a "petri dish," inadequate to sustain technology and will be discarded. The elites of course represent all life, reshaping it and carrying it to the heavens as part of its "normal expansion," technology part of the organic process, an adaptation like tails or claws: Life is personified and its purpose coincides with our (the elites') own.

Machines are perfect whereas we're "second-rate machines," so mechanization will replace unworthy limbs and organs--undoing the Fall into flesh and into time, into mortality and inevitable imperfection. Machinery will place Reason safely out of biology's reach--and must ultimately crush the devils even within the most disembodied mind: will, desire, intuition, uncertainty will be replaced by psychoengineering, emotions adjusted as by a thermostat. The humans will be left in a zoo and experimented upon socially and psychologically (and culled if they get too uppity). Idolatry for machines--they're anthropomorphized and the two "species" are declared to be merging, leaving no real difference between a leg and its prosthesis--soon turns into a resentful Oedipal complex against them. There's an essential nihilism under the cosmism: Earth's a small, empty, lonely tragedy; an eventual end to cogitation is so hideous as to deprive life today of all meaning. If we avoid extinction, "the human mind will prove that its destiny is eternity and infinity"; life's a valueless farce unless interstellar. There's lots of comet-cults, since they have no philosophy or theology to handle their "yearning." This isn't surprising--rocketry already promises perfection, a final phase of humanity, perpetual peace, release from biology, from life as "dusty exile" on Earth. Space's resources are promised to satisfy everyone. We can dispense with Earth and life altogether, and the whole present day can be sacrificed. Technology will defeat death, and souls and ideas are rendered into financial derivatives. The failure of all this is a big part of the 70s backlash: WWIII dashed their dreams of mortal godhood, and the Moon and Mars are hardly Gardens awaiting Man's reentry through the back route. "If you can do something, you must" and "what's imaginable is therefore practical" don't fly anymore.

The Moon was nuked 1958 and reached by the Anglos 1963, beating the German-Russians and therefore proving themselves the most democratic, since both Oceania and Eurasia agreed that whoever had the most science was consequently the most peaceful, moral, and democratic; however, Prince Gagarin was the first in space. There were lots of Apollo 1 incidents, but very few Nedelins; the 70s shuttles were already Buran-level and put together orbital assembly gantries for really big vessels. But the Lunar "first step" to Cosmic Destiny--of rocketry as making up for Bergen-Belsen, an end to war and prejudice--quickly turned out to be a mega-Antarctica: an extended scientific expedition. There's less than 2,000 on the Moon, running the radio and interferometry telescopes, giant supercolliders, and many, many geologic trips. They cooperate even when there's war Earthside, deactivating the mines--a peaceable elite within the technocratic elite, perhaps. Eurasia and Oceania have both landed on Mars in 1984 so there's something on TV besides the riots and contamination--and only confirming that Mars won't be of any help with those problems. Spaceflight's no longer compared to Columbus or the Cambrian radiation (or Plymouth Rock or the Louisiana Purchase or Zheng He or Conestoga wagons or ...), though Earthside they still claim it's fulfilling a "longing to explore" life's always had (even Stonehenge and the Pyramids are roped into this trajectory as "our need to reach for the stars"). Earth's not our cradle and our true home is not the stars: the Moon and Mars aren't colonies, trade partners, or lifeboats (technocrats start writing really sad SF where they get proven completely right about everything, that the dream wasn't a tissue of lies from the get-go). There's spy satellites and crewed stations with Gatlings, but it's hard to fight in space--and cosmonauts are loath to kill their fellows. Going to the Moon doesn't make someone a good drone or a passionate, "humanist" scientist preaching the gospel of weather control and Spirulina--it changes people.