Mesa is the boogy man it wasn't meant to be

Commodore Oakius wrote: ....Again I may be reading into this, but the last sentance seems to be a bit of foreshadowing to a point when Beowulf may decide it was wrong to dismiss everything Mesa wanted to do.

To date I cannot remember seeing a text reference of Leonard wanting this Alignment/Onion. In fact, If I remember correctly, I think Albrect said somthing about no being along the same lines as Leonard was all those years ago in Storm from the Shadows.
Can anyone point me to a pleace that shows it was Leonard's original idea to create the aligment?

The Beowulf Biosciences Code evolved directly out of the Final War. That’s why it unequivocally outlaws any weaponization of biotech in general…and why it places such stringent limits on acceptable genetic modification of humans.”

“And Mesa doesn’t agree with that, obviously,” Victor said.

“No, it doesn’t.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou agreed. “Leonard Detweiler thought it was a hysterical overreaction to a disaster, an isolated incident which, for all its horror, had after all been limited to a single star system. Mind you, the bio weapons had jumped the fire breaks between Old Earth, Luna, and Mars, but even at their worst, they’d never gotten beyond Sol’s oort cloud, and the human race had lots of star systems by then. And even if that hadn’t been the case, then surely humanity had learned its lesson. Besides, he didn’t have any real objection to outlawing weaponized biotech—or he said he didn’t, at any rate. It was the Code’s decision to turn its back on targeted improvement of the human genotype, to renounce the right to take our genetic destiny into our own hands, that infuriated him. ‘Small minds are always terrified by great opportunities,’ he said. He simply couldn’t believe any rational species would turn its back on the opportunity to become all that it could possibly be.”

He paused for a long moment, then sighed deeply.
“And the truth is, in a lot of ways, Detweiler was right,” he admitted. “Again, look at Honor and Yana. Nothing horrible there, is there? Or in any of a dozen—two dozen—specific planetary environment genetic mods I could rattle off. Even you Graysons.” He smiled at the Mayhews and shook his head. “Without the genetic mods your founders put into place so secretly, you wouldn’t have survived. But what Detweiler never understood—or accepted, anyway—was that what the mainstream Beowulfan perspective rejected was the intentional design of a genotype which was intended from the beginning to produce a superior human, a better human…what lunatics from Adolph Hitler to the Ukrainian supremacists to the Malsathan unbeatables have all sought—a master race. For all intents and purposes, a separate species which, by virtue of its obvious and designed superiority to all other varieties of human being must inevitably exercise that superiority.

“Detweiler never understood that. He never understood that his fellow Beowulfers were repelled by the reemergence of what had once been called racism which was inherent in his proposals.”

Hutch wrote:
There is a section in Cauldron of Ghosts (dinner with Honor), where Honor's Uncle Jacques discusses this in some detail (Chapter 16 if you have the book). I'm not going to post the entire conversation here (RFC would like to sell a few more copies), but here is a bit of the conversation:

Commodore Oakius wrote:

Hutch wrote:
There is a section in Cauldron of Ghosts (dinner with Honor), where Honor's Uncle Jacques discusses this in some detail (Chapter 16 if you have the book). I'm not going to post the entire conversation here (RFC would like to sell a few more copies), but here is a bit of the conversation:

So this seems to bolster my thoughts that Leonard didn't want galatic domination, just to attempt to improve the genome.
And I am curently 1/3 into Cauldron of Ghosts and have come accros the convo but forgot it. As I said it seems to bolster my thought that Mesa wasn't orgigianly meant, by Leonard, to conquor the galaxy. That grew later.

SWM wrote:To them, it is simply natural that the most advanced humans would end up dominating the galaxy after they are done. The genetically superior people would clearly be the best suited to rule. But it's not that they are seeking domination--it's simply that they are the best qualified.

Commodore Oakius wrote:

SWM wrote:To them, it is simply natural that the most advanced humans would end up dominating the galaxy after they are done. The genetically superior people would clearly be the best suited to rule. But it's not that they are seeking domination--it's simply that they are the best qualified.

I would agree except, and I may be picking nits but, they have plans to activly conquor the galaxy, not just wait and have themselves, the most evoled and advanced, become the leaders.

hanuman wrote:It was Leonard Detweiler's intention to create such a superior race/species of human. He might not have articulated the obvious outcome in so many words, but that outcome - the logic that those who are demonstrably superior must rule their inferiors - is inherent to any attempt to create such a race of superhumans.
It is therefore fair to argue that, yes, Mesa was always going to be a threat to the rest of humanity, whether Detweiler intended it to be or not. In this case, intention really doesn't count, only outcome.

Commodore Oakius wrote:

hanuman wrote:It was Leonard Detweiler's intention to create such a superior race/species of human. He might not have articulated the obvious outcome in so many words, but that outcome - the logic that those who are demonstrably superior must rule their inferiors - is inherent to any attempt to create such a race of superhumans.
It is therefore fair to argue that, yes, Mesa was always going to be a threat to the rest of humanity, whether Detweiler intended it to be or not. In this case, intention really doesn't count, only outcome.

In my original post I had mentioned somthing along the bolded line, Superiour intelligence begets superiour ambition.

But to be fair to Leonard, I dont think he wanted galactic control, despite what actually came out of it. Maybe his intent has nothing to do with the outcome, but then again he was not the one who turned the Mesans into the Alignment.
I may be splitting hairs here again, but the original differences between Beowulf and Mesa were not about Mesa conquoring the galaxy. It actually reminds me of the split between the Church of Humanity Unchained and the Faithful, a difference in degree following, not values. What Mesa became is a totally different animal.

Please let me state again That I may be picking nits, but I enjoy a good discussion/arguement. in this case I still feel Leonard was not a meglomanic, but a "forward" thinking in his "religion" of genetics.

Commodore Oakius wrote:

SWM wrote:To them, it is simply natural that the most advanced humans would end up dominating the galaxy after they are done. The genetically superior people would clearly be the best suited to rule. But it's not that they are seeking domination--it's simply that they are the best qualified.

I would agree except, and I may be picking nits but, they have plans to activly conquor the galaxy, not just wait and have themselves, the most evoled and advanced, become the leaders.

SotS Chapter 10 wrote:So far as the galaxy at large was aware, the planet Mesa was simply an outlaw world, home to ruthless and corrupt corporations from throughout the Solarian League's huge volume. Not a member of the League itself, Mesa nonetheless had lucrative contacts with many League worlds, which protected it and its "outlaw" owners from Solarian intervention. And, of course, the worst of the outlaws in question was none other than Manpower Incorporated, the galaxy's leading producer of genetic slaves, which had been founded by Leonard Detweiler the better part of six hundred T-years before. There were others, some of them equally disreputable and "evil" by other peoples' standards, but Manpower was clearly the standardbearer for Mesa's incredibly wealthy—and thoroughly corrupt—elite. And Manpower, equally clearly, was ruthlessly determined to protect its economic interests at any cost. Any and all of its political contacts, objectives, and strategies were obviously subordinated to that purpose.

SotS Chapter 10 wrote:It would no doubt have helped, in some ways, at least, if Leonard Detweiler had fully worked out his grand concept before establishing Manpower. No one could think of everything, unfortunately, and one thing Mesa's geneticists still hadn't been able to produce was prescience. Besides, he'd been provoked. His Detweiler Consortium had first settled Mesa in 1460 PD, migrating to its new home from Beowulf following the discovery of the Visigoth System's wormhole junction six T-years earlier. The Mesa System itself had first been surveyed in 1398, but until the astrogators discovered that it was home to one of the two secondary termini of the Visigoth Wormhole, it had been too far out in the back of beyond to attract development.

SotS Chapter 10 wrote:It was quite clear that Leonard's decision to rename the Detweiler Consortium "Manpower, Incorporated," had been intended as a thumb in the eye to the entire Beowulf establishment, and that thumb had landed exactly where he'd aimed it. And if Beowulf had been . . . upset by the Detweiler Consortium's practice of wholesale genetic modification of colonists to suit hostile environments like Mesa, it was infuriated when Manpower began producing "indentured servants" genetically designed for specific environments or specific tasks. At first, periods of indenturement on Mesa itself had been limited to no more than twenty-five T-years, although even after completing their indentures, the "genetic clients" had been denied the franchise and generally treated as second-class citizens. As they became an increasing percentage of the planetary population, however, the planetary constitution had been modified to make "indenturement" a lifelong condition. Technically, Mesa and Manpower continued to insist that there were no such things as "slaves," only "indentured servants," but while that distinction might offer at least some useful smokescreen for Mesa's allies and paid mouthpieces in places like the Solarian League's Assembly, it was meaningless to the institution's opponents.