Our Inhabited Island
Who’s manipulating you today?
The brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatski were giants of Russian-language science fiction, in the same way that Asimov, Bester, and Clarke are the ABCs of English-language sci-fi. Oh, and Ray Bradbury, too.
A major and distinctive feature of their work was incisive social and political commentary on the Soviet Union—some of which even got past Soviet censors. They did not criticize communism itself; in fact, many of their stories are set in a future where communism has prevailed worldwide, ushering in a post-scarcity high-tech utopia not unlike human society in the Star Trek universe. Nevertheless, they managed to include many criticisms of real-world Soviet communism that any attentive reader could recognize.
One of my favorite books of theirs is “The Inhabited Island”, which tells the story of a man named Maxim from a far-future Earth set in such an utopian universe. Maxim is a space explorer, which is not a highly regarded profession in his world. He stumbles across a planet, Saraksh, inhabited by a species that is nearly identical to humans. They live in a grim, totalitarian society with technology roughly equal to that of late 20th-century Earth; the mysterious governing elites are known as the Unknown Fathers. The major technological and physiological difference between this planet and the Earth we know is that they have discovered a form of mind-control radiation that only affects them (Maxim himself is immune). This radiation is broadcast from towers placed all over the country where Maxim crash-lands; twice a day, the towers cause everyone to go into a trance-like state of fierce patriotism and violent hatred for all enemies. Their official enemy is a neighboring state, with which this country recently fought a devastating war.
However, most ordinary people never encounter anyone from this enemy state; they just receive word of faraway battles and endure hardships in the name of The War. Instead, they focus their hatred on the so-called “vyrodki” (выродки), a word for which I’ve not yet found a satisfactory English translation; the closest I can come up with is “mutant freaks”. A literal translation of the word might be “those who are born to the outside [of the group]”—an implied contrast to regular people, who are born to the inside of said group. These freaks live among regular people and are said to be eternally plotting subversion on behalf of external enemies. The primary way they are recognized for what they are is that the mind-control radiation, rather than sending the freaks into a jingoistic frenzy, gives them debilitating headaches.
One translation refers to them as “degens” (short for “degenerates”), which makes me think of Letterkenny.
Over the course of the book, Maxim discovers more and more about the true nature of Saraksh society, with layers upon layers of deception and manipulation. SPOILERS: Not surprisingly, the heroic Maxim frees Saraksh from the mind-control towers. But then, it turns out that the degens are actually the secretive Unknown Fathers who control society. But then again, it turns out that another Earthling is actually masquerading as one of the degen Unknown Fathers and is secretly working to subvert and control the degens, who are themselves secretly working to subvert and control the rest of the population. Wheels within wheels, as they say.
I recently described how my father’s hard work back in the Soviet Union created an opportunity for us to live in America for a while (we didn’t know at the time that it would become a permanent move).
According to my parents, my first response when they told me that we might go to the US was “I will go with you, but only on the condition that I will be able to fight against capitalism while we’re there.”
My indoctrination was pretty thorough. The shock of actually moving to the US and being confronted with the lies and contradictions of Marxism-Leninism—combined with the malleability of my young mind—is, I think, what helped me to break out of that delusion and to deprogram from my Soviet childhood.
Years later, as I was graduating with a master’s degree from a top-tier university (back in 2002, when that actually meant something) and sure of my wisdom and mental fortitude in a way that only a twentysomething grad from a top-tier university can be, I decided that I would once again allow someone else do my thinking for me. But this time would be different, of course. Because I was choosing whom to trust, and there’s no way that I—not I!—could be giving my trust to someone who didn’t deserve it.
When I was attending Basic Military Training (“boot camp”) in late 2002-early 2003, we had a choice every Sunday morning. We could stay in the training barracks and clean and do other chores, or we could go to the Chapel for Sunday services. For context: in Basic, the barracks is a place where you get yelled at for literally everything you do. The Chapel is a place where you can sit around for a while without getting into trouble or being told to do any work.
I don’t practice any religion. My first Sunday at Basic, I went to the Chapel—as did everyone else. It wasn’t to worship; it was to take a quick break.
There were probably some elements of a church service that most people would recognize. Honestly, I don’t really remember them; I think I may have slept through most of it (we were already pretty sleep-deprived by then). I do remember musical interludes. There were times when, in between sermons and upliftingly patriotic remarks from the chaplain, the PA system played music while the projection screen showed larger-than-life video medleys of American military might. I very distinctly remember Toby Keith explaining The American Way while the screen showed bombs dropping from airplanes, helicopters firing rockets, and various targets disappearing in satisfying explosions.
Just as distinctly, I remember looking at one of my fellow shaven-headed young men who was just… possessed by the music. That’s the only phrase that can do it justice. He was grooving and bebopping with the music in a way that I didn’t think cornfed Midwestern white men were physically capable of. He was into it.
I didn’t go to the Chapel for the rest of my time in Basic.
If you’d asked me at the time why I didn’t go back, I would probably have told you that something about it just didn’t feel right. It just felt… unseemly for a religious service to be so flagrantly militarized, I guess. Looking back on it now, with the benefit of two decades of hindsight and my recent flirtation with rebellious skepticism, it’s tempting to claim/believe that I was already bucking against the renewed indoctrination—but I honestly don’t know what I was really thinking.
In a recent mentoring / training session for junior officers, we were discussing—among other things—China, our current national bugaboo. One of the junior Lieutenants opined that China wants to be the new world empire, replacing the US. America, in his estimation, is the current world empire—but it is “an empire for good.” Therefore, by definition, anyone opposed to this “empire for good” is evil.
I know I’m not the only who can’t help noticing the drumbeat for the next war. For all of 2022, it was Ukraine-Russia. We started to get bored of Ukraine in 2023—let’s face it, babe, this isn’t going anywhere, and you knew what this was—and then we were completely smitten with Israel-Hamas on October 7th.
Of course, we haven’t stopped pining for Iran, our favorite side-fling. That love affair began in the late 70s, and has been particularly torrid for the last two decades now. And we know that our true love, China, still waits faithfully for us.
This is no accident. We were sold on the wars in Kuwait, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria… Those wars have ended. We are being sold on the next one. As soon as one war ends, we forget all about the horribleness of Malign Actor X; instead, we are bombarded with information about the slightly different horribleness of Malign Actor X+1. And hot on the heels of that come the never-quite-completed arguments about why the US absolutely must take military action against X+1. Don’t think about it, just go along with the crowd. Trust us, we know what we’re doing.
Just like the hapless citizens of Saraksh, we are being whipped into a belligerent frenzy. The pattern of indoctrination and manipulation is easy to spot, once you’ve learned to recognize these things for what they are. The methods aren’t even all that subtle; they’re just harder to recognize from the inside.
Cui bono? is a well-known and well-used phrase, but cliches become cliches for a reason. “To whom [is] the benefit?” is a question worth asking.
Criminal investigators seek to answer this question to help identify suspects. When none are immediately apparent for a given crime, asking “theoretically, who would benefit from this crime?” is a way to prompt a murder investigator, for instance, to look a little more closely at the victim’s newly-wealthy widow before she gets on a plane to a non-extradition country with strong banking privacy laws.
Similarly, once we recognize that the reason we are told things is to influence our thoughts and actions, it behooves us to ask, “who would benefit from making me think that [blank]?”
Because someone stands to benefit if the US were to start a new endless war. And it’s worth thinking about who that “someone” is, because that will help us to determine whether it’s to our benefit, too.
I had the exact same experience in basic. I wasn't sure what I was more shocked by, 1. the very obvious tactics employed to manipulate homesick kids ("you're going to war, don't you want your family to know your soul is safe???"), or 2. How readily all the trainees ate it up.
I felt better making hospital corners in the dorms for those few Sunday hours the rest of bmt.