"Olaf Stapledon - Light and the Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

individuals. The old haphazard order so favourable to the fortunate and cunning self- seeker, was everywhere vanishing.
Inevitably men's lives w bound to be more and more regulated by authority. But what authority, and in what spirit? A great
planned state, controlled without insight into true community, must turn to tyranny. And, armed with science for oppression and
propaganda, it must inevitably destroy the humanity of its citizens. Only the insight and the will of true community can wield
rightly a state's authority, let alone a world's.

Lacking that insight and that will, the states of theworld in the age of balanced light and darkness bore very heavily on their




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Darkness and the Light




citizens and on one another. For national safety men's actions were increasingly controlled by the state, their minds increasingly
moulded to the formal pattern that the state required of them. All men were disciplined and standardized. Everyone had an
official place and task in the huge common work of defence and attack. Anyone who protested or was lukewarm must be
destroyed. The state was always in danger, and every nerve was constantly at strain. And because each state carefully sowed
treason among the citizens of other states, no man could trust his neighbour. Husbands and wives suspected one another. Children
proudly informed against their parents. Under the strain even of peace-time life all minds were damaged. Lunacy spread like a
plague. The most sane, though in their own view their judgment was unwarped, were in fact fear-tortured neurotics. And so the
race, as a whole, teased by its obscure vision of the spirit, its frail loyalty to love and reason, surrendered itself in the main to its
baser nature.

3 - MANKIND AT THE CROSS ROADS

i. RISE AND FALL OF A GERMAN REICH
ii. NORTH AMERICA
iii. RUSSIA AND CHINA
iv. THE RISE OF TIBET

i. RISE AND FALL OF A GERMAN REICH

OF THE detailed historical events of this age of fluctuation I cannot recover much. Of the war which is present to me as I write
this book I remember almost nothing. A few shreds of recollection suggest that it resulted in a British victory of sorts, but I place
no reliance on this surmise. If it is correct, the great opportunity afforded by this victory, the opportunity of a generous peace and
a federal order in Europe, must have been missed; for rival imperialisms continued to exist after that war and real peace was not
established. Subsequent wars and upheavals come rather more clearly into my mind. For instance, I seem to remember a defeat of
the democratic peoples, led at first by the British, but later by the North Americans, against a totalitarian Europe. For a while the
struggle was between Britain alone and the whole of Europe, martialled once more by Germany. Not till the remnant of the
British forces had been driven into Scotland, and were desperately holding a line roughly equivalent to the Roman Wall, did the
American power begin to make itself felt, and then only for a while; for in America, as elsewhere, the old order was failing, its
leaders had neither the imagination nor the courage to adjust themselves to the new world-conditions. Consequently, when at last
their turn carne they were quite incapable of organizing their haphazard capitalism for war. The American people began to realize
that they were the victims of incompetence and treachery, and the population of the Atlantic seaboard demanded a new regime. In
this state of affairs resistance became impossible. Britain was abandoned, and North America reverted to a precarious
isolationism knowing that the struggle would very soon begin again.