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creative progress like we could never imagine under
capitalism."
The Colonel would not give up: "I just don't want to
listen to all this babble about mind-stretching, need for
creativity, and the like bullshit. The people won't
understand your system and won't accept it, because the
motive force behind the progress of the human race has
always been and forever will be the desire of each
individual to get ahead of his neighbor, to become richer
then his neighbor, more powerful than his neighbor, to
become famous and make his neighbor green with envy, to buy
things which only you can buy and never your neighbor. You
want to destroy all this, to let everybody have anything he
wants, but the people will never accept such a state of
affairs where nobody can envy anyone. If this happens,
nobody would want to live at all, because there would be
nothing to live for! Imagine a typical everyday situation:
one guy, let's call him Kolya, strolls down the street and
meets his friend, let's call him Vasya, and says to him:
'Come and visit my place, I want to show you something. Show
what? Just come and you'll see.' And it turns out that Kolya
has, for example, a luxury model VCR, a genuine Panasonic
from Japan, and Vasya does not have anything like that! And
Kolya also has video cassettes, direct from US, with the
latest Hollywood blockbusters, and Vasya still has none of
these! And that's what makes Kolya happy! And that's why he
needs a VCR and cassettes! He doesn't really need these
idiotic blockbusters! He needs the satisfaction of knowing
that he is superior to Vasya! But if Vasya were to have the
same VCR, and the same movies, why would Kolya need a VCR at
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all, if this VCR doesn't help him to become superior to
Vasya? Why would he torture himself watching these idiotic
movies? And, on the other hand, why would Vasya want to
have a VCR, when Kolya, Petya, whoever, can at any moment
obtain the same VCR for themselves? You have invented an
absolutely useless thing, Mister Levshov. The people won't
understand you."
- "People? What do you know about people, Colonel? Do you
know how many people on planet Earth are starving?
Physically starving, and can actually die of starvation.
NanoTech can feed them and save them from death. Do you know
how many illiterate people are there on Earth? Really
illiterate people, people who cannot read, people who are
denied all the wonderful treasures of knowledge accumulated
by our civilization? NanoTech can open up to them these
treasures. And a VCR, as a means of obtaining knowledge,
could be very helpful in doing this. But when the age of
NanoTech arrives, neither a VCR, nor any other thing will
ever be the means of establishing Kolya's superiority over
Vasya, or Vasya's over Kolya. The time of apish games is
over. And, I hope, forever."
- "What do you mean by apish games? Explain yourself!" -
said the Colonel through clenched teeth.
- "You see, Colonel, human beings did descend from apes.
This is a firmly established scientific fact, whatever
various naysayers may say. Therefore, every human being
carries in his genes a burden inherited from the past - the
instincts of his wild ancestors. The apes are tribal
animals, and each tribe has its own hierarchy: it has its
chief and its outcasts, and it has all the rungs of the
hierarchical ladder between them, and each ape craves for a
higher rung on that ladder. That's the source of the
people's craving for power, glory, recognition, money, in a
word, for getting ahead of one's neighbor. All the social
systems of the past used this craving as a driving force for
their own development. The capitalistic system is especially
outstanding in this respect - it's not just an apish game,
it's a whole apish Olympics, which very efficiently exploits
all the instincts that humans inherited from beasts of the
wild. But human nature is not confined to bestial instincts,
human beings have one thing which beast lack. Humans have
reason. Reason can overcome instincts. Reason is the only
chance of freeing man from the tyranny of instincts. But
this chance cannot materialize while the social system
itself makes people to take part in the apish games.
NanoTech gives us a chance to stop this protracted apish
Olympics, to stop living as apes live, and at long last
start living as human beings should live, that is, live by
reason, not by instinct."
- "I can't understand you, Mr. Levshov. You seem to be an
intelligent man, an outstanding inventor, but your reasoning
is ridiculously naïve. Do you really believe you can go and
change all the social structure just like this? You want to
carry out a world revolution which will make everybody equal
overnight. To make the powers that be as powerless as
anyone. How can you seriously hope that those who have power
and money, and high social status, let go of their
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