What Would You Rather?

After reading Stanislaw Lem’s Furturological Congress, I was left wondering how I would have wished to live my life if I were in a similar situation. If I lived in a desolated world that was overpopulated, overgrown and about to freeze, would I want to know?  The conclusion that I came to is “I’m not sure”.

            It totally depends on the extent of the problems, and the capacity for me to personally help them. If I were a leading mind in the society, I would absolutely wish to know so that I could work to help the situation. However, if I was just a normal citizen, I don’t know if I would want to witness the downfall of the earth and society as we currently know it. Unfortunately, I think that I would rather be oblivious and have my life be filled with hallucinogenic that would make me forget about the troubles of the world and focus on living in the utopian society that is filled with benevolence and had no dependence on money.

Desense

The people in Lem’s The Futurological Congress are incredibly desensitized. Although Tichy says that the Costa Rica Hilton is one of the finest hotels to stay at, it seems very chaotic. Assuming that what Tichy says is true, we can judge that the society at large would be much worse than what is going on at this hotel. In fact, the sign that says “BOMB-FREE” actually serves to unnerve me, rather than qualm my fears that this hotel would have a bomb. There are people dying left and right, and yet Tichy does not seem phased by the deaths at all. This society has become so apathetic and accepting of any behavior that it has grown to be some kind of anarchy. I believe that the rampant drug use present in this future is to heighten the senses for a desensitized culture.

This book reminds me of The Matrix series (I'm guessing The Matrix series was based off of this book). Although the important questions of The Futurological Congress are less outright, The Matrix seems to voice them pretty well. Laurence Fishburne's character, Morpheus, posed an interesting question: "You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." Just like Neo, Tichy chose to stop taking the drugs and unveil himself to the horrors of this new society.

Virtual Reality

The virtual/simulated reality created by hallucinogenic drugs that Lem presents is very similar to that presented in the Matrix, as well as many other works of fiction (check it out!: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality_in_fiction). It also strongly reminded me of a short story by Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt”, wherein two children begin to love their simulated reality nursery more than their parents; that story ends with the parents being eaten by lions, a fate that the children had imagined so many times that it came true. I wasn’t really sure what to make of the ending to either of these stories (simulated reality will come true and eat you? everything is a dream?), but both stories share a critical apprehension of simulated realities. When does the simulated reality end and the real world begin? As the two worlds blend together, we become attached to the more pleasant and utopian virtual reality. As Lem showed, our attachment to that virtual reality would make it nearly impossible to be able to face the stark realities of our crumbling world. It’s much easier to slip into a perfect virtual world than it is to promote change and prosperity in a world where everyone has an opinion, and compromise seems almost folkloristic. Waking up with the world still crumbling around you, or seeing to fruition the parricidal fantasies of young children shows the harsh truth that simulated reality only serves to conceal. We need to be present, to be involved in our world and our future.

Control, Power and Psychemocracy

Ijon Tichy's psychedelic journey is a strange and disturbing one to say the least. Tichy has virtually no control over his experiences and, being a defrostee, holds much contempt towards the psychem dominated future. We soon learn that Tichy's distrust for psychemistry is well placed, that is, the experience and perception produced by the psychem pharmaceuticals are idealized falsifications of the real world. This futuristic Psychemocracy is really a mechanism for control. Symington would have Tichy and I believe that he and the other soothseers are protecting the general public from their disturbing reality by controlling their perceptions via psychemistry. Though the soothseers without question hold a great deal of power over the public each individual is in some way responsible for his lack of control as described by Tichy, "The fiendishness of it all is that part of this mass deception is open and voluntary, letting people think they can draw the line between fiction and fact. And since no one any longer responds to things spontaneously -- you take drugs to study, drugs to love, drugs to rise up in revolt , drugs to forget -- the distinction between manipulated and natural feelings has ceased to exist" (p.120). Whats even more ironic about this world is that it isn't even real. The whole of Tichy's futurological experience is the product of a hallucinogen. So in a way the Psychemocracy was produced by a perception controlling drug, which I think, is a sort of warning or critique of our attitude towards drugs and false experience. Though the drugs today, or in several decades ago, aren't nearly as sophisticated as those in 2069, nor is the government or governing body as controlling, drugs and other technologies are used to coerce our behave and we let it happen.

Caution: Reality

In my eyes Lem’s novel brings our perception of reality into question more than anything. Through Tichy’s eyes the reader sees how the future of our society may be built upon manipulation and fallacy, but only to preserve mankind. Lem portrays how we will go to incredible lengths to preserve ourselves, because it is an inherent and animalistic instinct. While the population in the novel takes pills in order to induce this psychedelic and utopic perception they have, I think the message can be taken one step further. Even without pills we manipulate our own understanding of the world around us and falsify what we see in order to serve our best interests. It’s sometimes difficult to question whether what we believe is actually the truth. We can shake the foundations of our beliefs by introducing just one foreign idea, but in the novel allowing people to live in their own world ensures mankind's prosperity. Ignorance really is bliss and opening your eyes can reveal some very ugly circumstances. I think parallels can be drawn between this and the ending of I, Robot. In I, Robot the reader is left to believe that mankind will continue to prosper, but at the expense of our awareness. Mankind becomes subject to its own creation in order ensure that we thrive in the long run. Viewed from the other side, we see in Frankenstein, that our awareness and understanding is what brings us closer to our downfall. It becomes easy to see that we destroy ourselves when we become “shipwrecked in reality” and instead we’re safest inside our own illusions, regardless of how we construct them.

I am Legend...and Lem

Last week I wrote about The Futurological Congress, so this week I am going to write about I am Legend the movie. I thought we had a thorough conversation about it in class on Thursday, but I’ll just add a few concluding thoughts. I was most interested in the discussion about Will Smith’s portrayal as a strong black man as it compares to Robert Neville’s book portrayal as a blonde Aryan man. We questioned if Will Smith’s casting decision was as a critical refute of the book character, or if it was just because Will Smith is a good action hero. I personally agree with the latter statement, but I think there is definitely an essay to be written about how the movie’s racial portrayals refute the book’s racial portrayals.

After our class discussion, I don’t have much more to say about the book vs. the movie, so instead I am going to keep writing about The Futurological Congress. I think the end to the novel was a little bit open to interpretation, and I would be interested to know what everyone else thinks about it. The vague ending makes the reader wonder if any of the story really did happen to Ijon, or if the whole thing was a result of a drug overdose. Either way, the plot suggests that the drugs that could lead to the end of true humanity itself. Whether or not the trippy dream is real, it acts as a warning about how our society could change because of our dependences.  

I like Lem because he reminds me of Vonnegut and brings past and present together.

After coming from Helen Sperling’s talk on her experience during the Holocaust and reflecting on Lem’s “Futurological Congress,” I am angry with the ways humanity has messed up the world’s beauty. It seems we can never appreciate the world’s beauty as it is. In “Futurological Congress,” Tichy reflects on the ways humanity looks to the future like there is something better waiting for humanity. Lem describes Tichy as incapable of being in the moment. After Tichy is wounded, he is frozen waiting for a cure. When he wakes up, he appears to be living, but he is still waiting for a cure in a frozen state of mind more or less. In his construction of Tichy, Lem sends us a message about our inability to live in the moment.

The text also conveys humanity’s need to learn from the past. Lem writes, “Yet hardly anyone studies history now—history has been replaced in schools by a new subject called hencity, which is the science of what will be” (p. 89). There are clear differences between science and history. Science is objective, while history is subjective. History directly follows the lives of humans, while science is a product of human history. Lem suggests that history deals with the soul, while science deals with the body, which according to Lem, doesn’t matter. Lem never quite says why the body doesn’t matter, which conveys his lack of regard for the human body. This lack of regard for the body can be seen in Tichy who battles with his own body as he goes in and out of hallucinations and a frozen state. It may be that living in the moment—tuning into our soul—requires an acknowledgement of past human history. 

Expression

It seems Stanislaw Lem wrote the Furturological Congress in a totalitarian society, with censorship all over the place, Lem had no way of expressing his mind without resorting to science fiction. Only the possibility of placing stories, placing meaning, in a world that existed in the future, existed beyond our own, could he escape the censors. And think about it, the whole notion of living in a matrix-like world, that must have been exactly what he felt about living in Soviet Poland.

Is Symington a Hero?

In Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress, Symington can be seen as both a hero and a villain. Symington is the head of the pharmaceutical company that manufactures and secretly distributes a class of psychogenic drugs – called mascons – to the entire world. These drugs cause the user to hallucinate, blinding him or her to the barren wasteland that is the world in 2098. Instead, people believe they live in a utopia where money does not exist, everyone can take a pill to shape how they view the world around them, etc. We soon find out that the apocalypse is near and the mascons were used to conceal the end of the world to Earth’s population. Does this make Symington a hero? On the one hand, he is allowing mankind to enjoy the few years it has left by leaving them ignorant to the horror that awaits them. He and a few others are the only ones that know the truth, and therefore, the only ones who are burdened by it. He is a hero because he decides to shield the world from knowledge that will only cause chaos and pain. On the other hand, he does not give mankind the right to choose whether they want to know the truth or not. In this way, he strips every man woman and child’s free will from him or her. Free will is an essential characteristic of humanity, one that makes every life special. Symington is not a hero because he strips this inherent human right from each person living in the world.