2312

“The Baltic states Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania called their 1989 withdrawal from the Soviet Union the singing revolutions, referring to the behavior of the demonstrators in the city plazas. That brings up a point: people in physical masses seem to matter. If enough of the population takes to the streets in mass demonstrations, governments have no good defense. ‘They must dismiss the people and elect another one,’ as Brecht said. That being impossible, they often fall. Or a civil war begins.”

“Surely the literature on revolutions can’t be this superficial,” Swan said. “You’re just quoting random stuff! You have a mind like the rings of Saturn, a million miles wide and an inch deep.”

“Catachresis and antiquated measurement units indicate irony or sarcasm. Coming from you, probably sarcasm-”

“She said sarcastically! You search engine you.”

“A quantum walk is a random walk by definition. Please upgrade my program anytime you feel you can. I’ve heard Wang’s other algorithm is good. Some principles of generalization would be useful.”

“Go on about reasons revolutions happen.”

“People adhere to ideas that explain and offer psychological compensation for their position in the class system of their time. People either increase their sense of dispossession by clarifying it, or they try to dismiss it as unimportant because of an ideology that justifies their dispossession as part of a larger project. People thus very often act against their own interests as the result of ideologies they hold which justify their subalternity to themselves. Denial and hope both play a hand in this. These compensatory ideologies are part of the hegemonic influence over subject peoples in an imperial situation. It happens in all class systems, meaning all cultures in recorded history, since the first agrarian and urban civilizations.”

“They’ve all been class systems?”

“There might have been classless societies before the Neolithic agricultural revolution, but the record makes our understanding of those cultures very speculative. All we can say for sure is that in the post-ice age agricultural revolution, which was one of those more general revolutions that took perhaps a thousand years, a division into classes was institutionalized as a state power apparatus. All over the world, and independent of others, there emerged a four-level division into priests, warriors, artisans, and farmers. Often they were all under the rule of what everyone agreed was a sacred monarch, a king that was also a god. This was very useful for the priest and warrior classes, and for the power of men over women and children.”

“So, never a classless society.”

“Supposedly classless societies have been instituted after certain revolutions, but there are usually leaders in these that quickly form a new ruling class, and the various social roles taken by citizens of the post-revolutionary state revert to classes because of differential value given to different social roles, leading to a new hierarchy being constructed fairly rapidly, usually within five years.”

“So all cultures in history have had class systems.”

“It is sometimes asserted that Mars is now a classless society with a complete horizontalization of economic and political power throughout the population.”

“But Mars itself is a bully now. In the total system they’re like an upper class.”

“People have said the same thing about the Mondragon.”

“And we see how well that’s going.”

“Compared to the situation on Earth, it could be said to be a great success, indeed a revolution of sorts, following incrementally on the Martian Revolution.”

“Interesting. So…” Swan thought for a while. “Make up a recipe for a successful revolution.”

“Take large masses of injustice, resentment, and frustration. Put them in a weak or failing hegemon. Stir in misery for a generation or two, until the heat rises. Throw in destabilizing circumstances to taste. A tiny pinch of event to catalyze the whole. Once the main goal of the revolution is achieved, cool instantly to institutionalize the new order.”

“Very nice. That’s really very creative of you. Now quantify the recipe, please. I want specifics; I want numbers.”

“I refer you to the classic Happiness Quantified, by van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, which contains a mathematical analysis helpful in evaluating the raw ingredients of a social situation. It includes a satisfaction calculus that along with a Maslovian hierarchy of needs could be applied to actually existing conditions in the political units under evaluation, using Gini figures and all relevant data to rate the differential between goal and norm, after which one could see if revolutions happened at predictable shear points or were more nonlinear. The van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell should also be useful in imagining the nature of the political system that should be the goal of the process, and the changes to get there. As for the process itself, Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution is always interesting to ponder.”

“He has numbers?”