The future?

We used the bay-windowed front room of our old villa as a library and study. Many books lined the walls, and there were bookshelves in almost every other room of the house. Moving from there, resulted in many boxes of books. The science fiction collection remained in boxes for more than ten years until relatively recently. Needing a book to read during my holidays, I chose a book by CJ Cherryh, Down Below Station, with the guidance of S. This book is set some two to three hundred years later, in the same remote star system. I am pleased that I have read these two books, and this one particularly.

Yesterday I posted a photo of a sunset and reflected on the darkness within the soul of much modern society, resulting in mass school shootings in the US. In a comment on that, Arachne wrote of teenage knife murders in London, and asked "what do we do?"

I don't pretend to know how to answer that question. However, what I do believe is that the young people whose personal essence is so damaged that they act in these ways, can be described as lost souls. They are persons whose young lives may have seen them suffer severe neglect (physical or emotional, actual or in effect), abuse (physical, emotional, sexual), and/or exposure to deprivation (including educational), drug use, crime and ultimately alienation from society, be that familial, local or national.

The connection with this book for me is that it about a human society (the Union) which established a colony on a planet not knowing that there was a sentient species there. To support some 452 citizens ("man-born men") they included 40,000 non citizens ("lab-born men"). The lab-born were clones of particular gene lines and were given numbers. They were mind manipulated to do certain tasks, and to serve the citizens. The union than abandoned the colonists, and over a number of generations, all became man-born as there was intermarriage, and along with various other interactions with the aliens, a new working society was established, which was more inclusive.

I see our current societies as deliberately developing a controlled and constrained underclass to serve the perceived needs of the overclass. Everything is predicated upon the middle class being forced downwards into the underclass. 

So what we do is to demand and take action to enable the disenfranchised to develop their human capabilities to their fullest extent so as to negate the downwards pressure, and aid all to become full citizens. We are the 99% and the 1% cannot control us if we don't wish to be controlled. We can help develop an inclusive society.