Mack Reynolds - Equality - In the Year 2000

They looked up at his approach.

“I’m not intruding, am I?” he said hurriedly, already turning to leave.

“No, no, of course not,” Leete told him. “It’s just that I had another strange experience this morning.”

Julian stopped in his tracks.

The doctor said slowly, “I went out for a drive through the countryside, just to gather my thoughts about a project I’ve been involved in for some time. I was on manual control, of course, most of the surface roads not being automated as yet. When a car pulled up behind me, I edged over to the side of the road to let it pass. However, it didn’t pass. I slowed. It slowed. There were four men in it. I couldn’t make them out very well, but they all seemed to be somewhat young. Still not thinking it overly strange, I sped up. They sped up and deliberately hit my rear bumper, an action that wasn’t particularly safe at that speed.”

“Jesus Christ!” said Julian.

The other went on, “Somewhat shocked now, I sped up still more, and they continued to pursue. In my rear view mirror I could see that the two in the front seat were laughing. I tried everything I could think of; I turned down smaller side roads, thinking that they would continue on the highway, but they didn’t. They kept following, bumping my rear bumper at every opportunity. I was terrified that I might turn over. My car was an open one; theirs wasn’t.”

“Good heavens, Father,” Edith exclaimed. “Why didn’t you summon Highway Security?”

He looked at her strangely. “I couldn’t. My car phone wouldn’t work. They pursued me a good many kilometers before finally dropping away and abandoning the chase. I returned immediately and confronted one of the mechanics at the car pool. He examined the vehicle that I had taken over and, his face’s ace set in amazement, said that the car phone had been tampered with. I simply can’t understand it. And one other thing that would seem impossible…”

He reached into a side pocket and brought forth a piece of paper, handing it first to Julian. “I found this in my pocket, after I got back here to the apartment.”

Julian scowled down at it. “…one must either anticipate change or be its victim.—John K. Gal-braith.”

Julian handed the paper to Edith. As she read it, he asked, “Could someone have slipped it into your pocket down in the lobby, or coming up in the elevator?”

“Why… I suppose so,” the older man said, scowling. “I probably nudged against people all the way up from the car pool.”

Julian slumped into a chair. He suspected that he was more at home in this atmosphere than were these other two, who had lived in a sheltered society for the past thirty years.

He took a deep breath and said, “Look, in this Republic of the Golden Rule society of yours, are there many malcontents?”

They didn’t quite understand him at first.

He said impatiently, “I know this is Utopia, but there must be some who are dragging their heels. Even in Heaven there was a revolt of the angels and they had to kick Lucifer and some of the boys out.”

Leete scowled. “We keep telling you, Julian: this is not Utopia. There is no such thing as Utopia. Society is in a continual condition of flux. Of course there are malcontents in United America today.”

“Who are they?”

He thought about that. “There are various individuals and groups. For instance, some of those who were at the very top under the former socioeconomic system; some of the ultra-wealthy; some of the former politicians who wielded great power and loved it.”

Edith said, “Some of the military, especially the top brass. But also lower echelons of the military who liked it for its own sake—its discipline, its traditions of glory.”

“I see what you mean,” Julian muttered. “If George Armstrong Custer or old Blood-and-Guts George Patton were alive today, they’d hate a world in which there was no longer the need for war.”

Leete added, “Quite a few of the religious, too. They rebel against the fact that religion is so rapidly disappearing under this socioeconomic system.”

That surprised Julian. “You mean that you can’t study religion any more?”

“No, no. 1 don’t mean that at all. A student can study religion, any religion. But we no longer teach religion as though it were true. If you decide that anything from the Amish to Zoroastrianism is the true faith, then you’re certainly free to embrace its teachings. But we don’t teach religion as religion . As the old expression goes, we let everyone go to hell in his own way. Some of the more orthodox—the Fundamentalists, the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox Jews—object. Younger people in our society don’t pay much attention to religion, which infuriates the generations which were raised in it.”

“Who else?” Julian asked grimly.

Both Edith and the doctor thought for awhile.

Edith said, “There are some who strongly object to the fact that two percent of the population is all that is needed to produce what we need. Many of these, too, are members of the old religions, such as the Seventh Day Adventists. The Bible says that man was meant to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; today, nobody need sweat any more. Surprisingly enough, a good many of these objectors are among the ninety-eight percent who don’t work and subsist on their Guaranteed Annual Income. I suppose they are the ones who can find no manner in which to fill their leisure time profitably.”

Julian grunted.

Leete said slowly, “In actuality, there are quite a few of the older people, those in their sixties and beyond, who are taken aback by the many changes and long for the old ways. They haven’t kept up with the changes, and the so-called generation gap hits them the hardest. They rebel against everything from the new way of schooling to the new sexual permissiveness. They object to the fact that drugs are no longer controlled, or to pornography being freely available to anyone silly enough to want to read it. Some even protest that there is no longer news censorship on any level.”

“All right,” Julian said. “Most of those you’ve mentioned belong to the older generations. Time has passed them by and they’re uncomfortable. How about dissident groups among the younger people?”

Edith was obviously the one to answer that. She said, her voice unhappy, “Some of our youth, usually those of too low an Aptitude Quotient to be selected by the computers for a job on Muster Day, read the old stories and look at the old movies and TV shows in the International Data Banks and become enamored of the past. They seem to think present-day life is static and unadventurous.”

Her father said sourly, “When I was a youngster, I used to dream of the days when knights were bold and damsels swooned. It never occurred to me that during the Dark Ages not one person out of a hundred was a knight or a damsel. Ninety-nine percent of the population were out in the fields, serfs grubbing away at the soil with primitive tools.”

“Who else?” Julian demanded. “Who else in this Utopia of yours wants change?”

Both of them thought for long moments, and finally both shook their heads.

Julian said, “In my day, and before it, there were people, most of whom were probably very idealistic, who were nevertheless rebels. They existed in just about every country, and in every socioeconomic system. I guess you could say they were revolutionists . People in my position were inclined to believe these types to be crackpots, or opportunists. But most of them were not. Tom Paine, for instance, who probably more than any other single person put over the American Revolution of 1776, was neither a crackpot nor personally ambitious. Neither was Lenin or Trotsky. Neither was Mao or Che Guevara. Who else can I think of who wasn’t grinding his own ax? Let’s say Jean-Paul Marat, of the French Revolution; Rosa Luxemberg, the German radical following the First World War; the anarchist, Kropotkin. Let’s say Wendell Phillips, the American abolitionist.”