John Brunner - The Squares of the City

Gradually the turmoil subsided; some of the technicians departed for the bar, talking volubly, and others set about rearranging the cameras and lighting for another transmission later on. Cordoban gestured to me to hang on for a moment; he himself hovered at Mayor’s side, and when the balding man had finished reviewing the program with Senora Cortes, caught his attention.

Sharp brown eyes, the whites a little bloodshot, skewered me as Mayor swiveled his head toward me; he listened to Cordoban intently, paused—not hesitated; there was something about his manner that suggested he never needed to hesitate over a decision—and then nodded and smiled.

His smile was quick, unforced, and unlasting: a tool, an expression that communicated a particular implication, to be ended when the significance had been put across. I went up to him with a feeling that this meeting was not quite real; for so long Alejandro Mayor’s name had not been associated in my mind with a man, but with a set of precepts, and to find them embodied in an individual was disconcerting.

He shook my hand, briefly. “I have heard all about you,” he said in good English. “All, that is, except what I only now hear from Francisco here—that in one sense I can claim you as a pupil of mine.”

He cocked his head a little to one side, as though he had thrown out a challenging statement in a debate and wanted me to worry about it. I said, “In one sense, yes, doctor. I was much influenced by your book The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State.”

He frowned—briefly again; it seemed that he did everything by precisely measured small doses. “Ah, that,” he said distastefully. “My first book, senor—full of inaccurate theorizing and pure guesswork. I disclaim it; it was a firework, nothing better.”

“How so?”

Mayor spread his hands. “Why, when I wrote it, I was innocent of experience in practical government. There were a thousand, a hundred thousand errors in points of detail, which only practical government could expose for what they were. I can excuse it on only one good ground—that it caused our president to interest himself in my work.”

A technician signaled for his attention; he excused himself for a moment and listened to what the man had to say. I used the interlude to run over in my mind what I could remember of that first book which had so impressed me and which he now declared to have been full of mistakes.

A firework, he called it—well, that was accurate enough. It was a virtuoso display of paradoxes: opposing arguments brilliantly set forth so that one could hardly question the logic on either side. He presented, among other things, a picture of the free democratic state as the high point of the social evolution of man; then, with shattering precision, he proceeded to demonstrate that the free democratic state was far too unstable to endure and therefore guaranteed its citizens misery and destruction. He presented totalitarian systems as stable, enduring, reliable—and then mercilessly exposed one by one the factors which rendered their eventual downfall inevitable. By the time the reader was dizzy, Mayor was tossing out provocative suggestions for remedying these defects, and the total impression left on students like myself—who went through college faced with what seemed like equally appalling alternative futures: nuclear war or a population explosion that would pass the six billion mark by the end of the century— was that for the first time the West had produced a man capable of forging social techniques to match the situation. For myself, convinced as I had been that the ant heap state of People’s China was the only place where adequate social techniques to cope with the population explosion were being evolved, his book had been a revelation. Even now, eighteen years after I had first read it, I could hardly imagine where lay these flaws of which Mayor had just spoken. Of course, if I were actually to reread it or read some of his newer work in which presumably these faults had been rectified, I’d see what he meant.

I watched him as he disposed crisply of the problem raised by the inquiring technician. So he had been a minister here since the time I read that first book of his… The fact struck me as amazing at first—my automatic reaction was that if he had in fact been applying his theory of government and administration of the state, practically every move he made ought to have had sensation value.

Then I recalled a passage from his first book which had stuck in my mind: “People do not object to government; to be governed, whether by custom or by decree, is part of the human condition. People object to what might be called the scaffolding of government. With the spread of literacy and the drawing together by communications of our small planet, more and more individuals became aware of that scaffolding; more and more individuals oppose it because they can see it. How do we create government without scaffolding? There is a central problem for modern society.”

Well, of course, if he hadn’t dismissed that, too, as an error, it would explain a lot.

He was turning back toward us now—toward me in particular. “You have dined this evening, Senor Hakluyt?” he was asking.

I shook my head.

“Then please join us here. Consider it a fee for your appearance; I may say it has been most valuable to us.”

I pondered the significance of that all through the meal, which we had in the bar where Cordoban had bought me a drink before the program. Senora Cortes, Rioco, and Cordoban came with us; they discussed future current affairs broadcasts in Spanish with Mayor, which rather irritated me, because I had hoped to probe further into the evolution of his theory which Mayor had hinted at. It was only toward the end of the meal that I managed to gain his undivided attention and put some of the questions that were irking me.

“Dr. Mayor,” I said, “you mentioned errors in your first book. What were they? Or what were the important ones? I’ve been thinking back, and I can’t decide.”

“I underestimated progress,” said Mayor shortly. “Senor Hakluyt, you are a stranger in Aguazul. You will therefore be inclined to dispute the dogmatic assertion that this is the most governed country in the world.”

Again that air of throwing down a gauntlet in debate, again that cocking of the head to imply a challenge. I said, “All right—I dispute it. Demonstrate.”

“The demonstration is all about you. We make it our business, first, to know what people think; we make it our business, next, to direct that thinking. We are not ashamed of that, senor, incidentally. Shall we say that—just as specific factors influence the flow of traffic, and you understand the factors and can gauge their relative importance—we now understand many of the factors that shape and direct public opinion? What is a man, considered socially? He is a complex of reactions; he takes the line of least resistance. We govern not by barring socially unhealthy paths, but by opening most wide those paths which are desirable. That is why you are here.”

“Go on,” I invited after a pause.

He blinked at me. “Say rather what is your view. Why is it we have adopted this round-and-round policy of inviting an expensive expert to solve our problems subtly, instead of saying, ‘Do this!’ and seeing it done?”

I hesitated, then counter-questioned. “Is this, then, the extension of an existing policy rather than a compromise between opposed personal interests?”

He threw up his hands. “But naturally!” he exclaimed, as though surprised to find me so obtuse. “Oh, it is ostensibly that there is conflict between one faction and another—but we create factions in this country! Conformism is a slow death; anarchy is a rapid one. Between the two lies a control which”—he chuckled—”like a lady’s corset in an advertisement, constricts and yet bestows a sense of freedom. We govern our country with a precision that would amaze you, I believe.”