runsforcelery wrote:runsforcelery wrote:
I wonder if it may partially feel that way because they are not obviously as frothingly mad wild eye evil as - say Citizen Ransom or some of those people on Grayson & Masada, or a sociopath like Oscar St Just, or even deeply, deeply corrupt like Young or High Ridge - and are - in once sense actually trying to build something?
In some ways, that's how they are supposed to come across. I think iwhat you're seeing is some of the banality of evil peeking through, because that's exactly how they see themselves. Of course, so did Rob and Oscar, but I think I took you more fully inside their heads in some ways than I've done with the Alignment. The thing about the Alignment is that both they and the Mandarins represent one of the things I find most dangerous in all the world: people in positions of vast power who never even question the total, complete, and
exclusive validity and rectitude of their belief system. . . especially if it just happens to validate their right to power and feed their own rapaciousness. People in those positions come in two really deadly varieties. (1) The scumbag: the system I embrace absolves me of my responsibilities in time of peace and I will embrace
any means to protect it (and, of course, me) when it comes under threat. (2) The true believer: the sheer sancity off the system I embrace automatically validates
anything I do in its support. (And, of course, it that allows me to remain in power as the vanguard of the proliferate or whatever, that's merely evidence of the wise judgement of a benign providence.) Hard to exaggerate the damage either of them can do, but the really scary thing is that if you really get inside their heads, everything they do makes sense from their POV.[/q
Actually. now that I think about it, I suspect there's another reason.
I think — hope, really — that to some extent, on a certain level, the reader can actually identify with the avowed purposes of the Detweiler Plan. And I also hope that the reader recognizes the fundamental humanity of the people capable of pursuing such an
inhuman strategy.
What the Mesan Alignment was
originally founded to accomplish is A Good Thing™ in a lot of ways, and the reader is inside the current crop of Detweilers' heads. He can see that their commitment is genuine and that, in many ways, they aren't monsters — at least in their own eyes, or where the people they actually know are concerned — at all.
In addition, since he doesn't live in the Honorverse, he's able to look at the situation without all those centuries of gradually weakening prejudice against the notion of any designed
program of genetic uplift as the first slippery slope on the road back to the super soldiers and the warfare between them and the "normals" which almost destroyed the birth world of the human race. (I think it would be very difficult to exaggerate the scar that the Final War left on the collective human psyche in the Honorverse. Maybe I need to go back and do a short story set during the rescue mission to Old Earth from Beowulf. That war came within an eyelash of literally rendering Old Earth uninhabitable, and a huge part of what started and drove it to such lengths was the resentment of the genetic construct "super soldiers" who saw all the rest of humanity as at best cattle and at worst their mortal enemies. So there's a reason for that lingering fear, that residual prejudice, against any effort to
systematically "upgrade" the human race.)
The reader doesn't see that, though. Or not to the same extent that people living in-universe do. And because of that, the reader is in a much better place when it comes to impartially evaluating whether or not what Leonard Detweiler originally wanted to accomplish was a good thing. The benefits are so stunningly obvious to him, that it's hard for some of that "But what they want to accomplish should to be a no-brainer" not to leak over into their perception of the Detweilers and the other members of the Onion. These are people whose professed purpose is to
make things better at the end of the day. And in its case "better" doesn't just mean a more comfortable income, a nicer car, or even guaranteed healthcare. It means, literally, centuries more of life, greater resistance to disease, enhanced senses, bodies that are faster, stronger, and tougher than any human has ever been. That's what the Alignment tells itself —
and believes — that it is trying to accomplish, and so, in its own eyes, it's a Force for Good™.
That was true of Rob Pierre, also, of course. Yes, he was a member of the corrupt power elite before his revolution, and, yes, he murdered — or had murdered — hundreds of thousands, probably even millions, of Legislaturalists and their families. And, yes, he pursued the war against Manticore when he "didn't have to." His problem was that he thought he
did have to because without that focus, he would have lost control of his own revolution and Bad Things™ would have happened. The problem was that he wound up contributing to much larger Bad Things™ for the galaxy at large.
The reader, though, watched Pierre make one bargain after another with the devil and saw the consequences very clearly, not just from Manticore's side but from the side of people like Thomas Theisman, Warner Caslet, Shannon Foraker, and dozens of other
Havenites. As such, it was easy to lose track of his "good intentions" and to remember which road is paved with them.
But another big difference between him and his allies and the Alignment (and I've done this deliberately) is that you
never saw his or Oscar Saint-Just's home lives. You knew Pierre's son — briefly — and, unless you were pretty strange, you weren't exactly blown away by the Mother Theresa side of his personality. You
never saw Saint-Just's family. And so you had these two guys who, whatever their motives, were wreaking enormous damage on billions of lives without anything to set them into a more humanist/humanized context.
With the Alignment, I've been careful to show you just that. You've seen Albrecht and his wife, including their last moments of life on Mesa. You've seen Albrecht interacting with his sons. In the upcoming book, you'll see more of that. And because of that, I've shown them to you through the eyes of a sympathetic situation. You're supposed to recognize that they are good parents, loving sons, good uncles to each other's children . . . who just happen to have sold their souls to further a fundamentally flawed — and almost certainly
unnecessary — conspiracy that is going to kill billions
even if it succeeds perfectly.
They fall into my second category above. They are true-believers, raised to
be true-believers, and with nothing in their immediate orbit to bring them face-to-face with reality. Jack McBryde's critical flaw (from the Alignment's perspective) was a powerful sense of empathy. Herlander Simões and his desperate love for his culled foster daughter broke through to him on a personal level. And then, far worse, he extended from the individual to the general. He realized how many other Fredericas there'd already been, how many more there
would be, and how much more terrible the casualty count was going to be when the plan was fully executed. I think it's highly probable that he would have suicided anyway if Victor and Anton hadn't offered him — and Herlander — a way out.
The Detweiler boys have a sense of empathy, but they apply it only to those within the group they recognize as being "on the right side of history." After so many centuries of the Detweiler Plan, they have completely dehumanized their adversaries . . . which, after all, is one of the things that the Beowulf Code feared might happen if someone started designing "super humans" who would find themselves the lions in a herd of antelope.
But for the reader to fully understand just how horrific their commitment to the Detweiler's Plan's objectives
regardless of the cost truly is, I can't dehumanize
them for him. Instead, I have to do the reverse.
Frankly, that may be one reason they strike some people as "a dud." It's not just that they don't display all sorts of superhuman abilities. They don't display any sense of themselves as an Evil Conspiracy™ at war with all the rest of the galaxy. They see themselves as the Forces of Good™ at war with the evil of the rest of the galaxy's
blindness where the righteousness of their cause is concerned. And like political extremists everywhere, they're perfectly comfortable with the theory that "a few must be sacrificed for the good of the many." So let's shoot all the bourgeoisie and get started.
Edited because I accidentally hit the "submit" button instead of the "preview" button.
To quote Shannon Foraker, "Oops."
)