Barrington Bayley - Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus - The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

3. Economic deformations: all economic networks report an upsurge in new and unaccustomed directions from March to December of last year. Intermittent surges and subsidences in economic activity are by no means unusual, but several features of this one are perplexing. The networks unanimously claim that their new production initiatives were in response to demand arising from innovations in fashion; but it has proved impossible to trace any originating source for this demand. Even more puzzling, the new fashions seem suddenly to have dissipated before the production period was properly completed, and the networks are now left with vast stocks of useless articles.

One or two of the new commodities, such as the models of the Antarctic Structure which emit random buzzing noises, are clearly related to the influence of the Morleyites; but others, such as the holovid set able to screen nothing except the process of its own production, fulfil no obvious purpose.

4. To the layman it might seem that the above events, while concurrent in time, could not have very much bearing on one another. To explain how they possibly could, it will be necessary briefly to review the theory of social energy fields .

Early social science was separated, broadly speaking, into two camps. One view held that the individual human being is the only social reality, and that society itself has no substantive existence, but is only an arrangement, or ‘contract’, between autonomous, self-conscious individuals. The opposing camp, however, denied that consciousness is an attribute of the individual mind at all. According to this doctrine, consciousness is an aggregate social function; the ‘self’ has no independent existence and is a product, or reflection, of social forces. During the 20th and 21st centuries a series of wars was fought over this divergence in ideologies, as contending parties attempted either to destroy all forms of collective (or ‘state’) control, or else to establish a world of collective harmony in which only group aims were admitted.

As with many diametrically opposed concepts, both were right and both were wrong. The individualist concept was erroneous because the social conditioning of individual consciousness is an observable fact, and in most cases is practically absolute. The collective concept is untenable on more theoretical grounds. If it were true, the collective cultural pool would be its own single source of influences and ideas, there being nowhere else from which to replenish them. Like any system denied an energy input, it would suffer a continuous downgrading of vitality. Since growth and novelty are more characteristic of cultures than is decline this doctrine also fails to answer the facts, and the regular injections into the common pool of fresh initiatives can only be attributed to individual qualities.

Gradually it came to be realised that society, with its properties of gregariousness and organisation, can be adequately expressed only as a polar structure in which the individual comprises one pole and the collective or ‘aggregrate’ entity the other pole, the two taken together having the properties of opposition, complementarity and inseparability.

It could be argued that the social polarity is a fictional concept since the ‘aggregate’ pole is scattered over the surface of the Earth. However, the dimensions selected are not those of physical space but of ‘social space’. Mathematically the ‘cultural polarity’, as it is sometimes called, belongs to the same class of structures as does a magnetic field, with which it shares many characteristics.

The Psychological Aspect: Not only does the social polarity extend worldwide, it is also present in every individual brain. Human consciousness is clearly acted on by forces coming from two opposite directions: a man is both himself, and he is society. This ambiguity, an existential double-take, is absolutely ineradicable; neither pole can be omitted. The individual has innate qualities, urges and desires, but these cannot develop without appropriate stimuli; if bereft of society – if raised by animals, perhaps – he could not develop into a human person. Likewise, without individuals there could obviously be no society. Neither can persist without the other, and indeed until they coalesce within the brain no human being exists.

The Organisational Aspect: The substance of the psychological polarity is the substance out of which all forms of social organisation are constructed.

The polar binding force stretches from individual to total aggregate through a wide range of intermediate forms. The first manifestation of the binding force is known technically as coherence , in analogy to laser light which is of uniform wave-length and whose waves all move in step. Coherence refers to the principle of conformity in human affairs: the force of fashion, of national and cultural identity, of religious belief, and so on. Coherence involves no conscious organisation. The masses of individuals keep in step apparently of their own volition, but in reality because of the mimicking nature of this force.

Like magnetic fields, the SEF (social energy field) is fairly static in its ground state. A magnetic field can, however, be made to give rise to an electric current which flows at right angles to the field; the social polarity has a similar property in that it may give rise to a flow of organised directiveness , this being a general term implying the intentionality of a system, and covering anything having the nature of a project. Invariably it involves a movement from a past condition to a future altered condition; usually (but not necessarily) it involves the deployment of material forces.

Organised directiveness could therefore be said to be an SEF potential. When the flow actually occurs, however, it adds an extra dimension to the field, transforming it into a quadropolar energy structure requiring, for a complete description, not two, but four terms: individual and aggregate poles, positive and negative flow terminals.

Cohesiveness is the term used to describe the condition of an SEF which is giving rise to a flow of organised directiveness. The economic system is its most obvious manifestation.

The Principle of Conformation: The chemical term conformation describes the ability of some molecules to adopt various configurations, a different energy state being associated with each. The SEF is similarly capable of a range of conformations, in which the individual and aggregate poles are variously emphasised.

The most extreme aggregate-favoured conformation is the mass crowd, or mob, probably the closest the aggregate pole ever gets to leading an independent existence. The characteristics of a crowd, both physically and psychologically, differ so radically from those of a healthy individual that it has been held to constitute a separate form of life, or rather, to constitute an entity intermediate between animate creatures and inanimate forces. An invariable feature of crowds is that the faculty of self-determination, which to some degree is present in every individual, is totally lacking in them. A crowd exhibits the characteristics of raw energy or a body of water. It does not respond to instructions or appeals but only to physical barriers and conduits, provided they are strong enough. Any individual trapped in a crowd is, therefore, robbed of any control over his own movements, and should crowd control measures fail then internal pressures within the crowd can very quickly reach lethal proportions.

The crowd’s power to submerge the individual is no less psychological than physical. Individuals who least expect it of themselves may find their judgement abdicated to crowd emotion, their feelings funnelled in a single direction like a torrent at full flood – a syndrome which has been a source of elation to those leaders who have learned to arouse it.