3.2 KiB
Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)
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Author: u/Haiy *
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Score: 22
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Created: 2015-08-21T17:25:27
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+5] (7 hours later)
It would be lovely if it was just as easy to actually obtain a PhD as to merely persevere through everyone calling you a backwards retard for a period of years.
u/Meneth32 [+2] (15 hours later)
That didn't give you a PhD. That just got you into grade school. :}
u/Charlie___ [+3] (4 hours later)
The segregation of women really struck me here. I sometimes find an interesting contrast between Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea (which is male-dominated and segregated) and her influential (both in-story and out) female and non-binary characters in later series. But seeing this makes me think that it's no wonder Earthsea ended up as it did, because that's how everyone did it, and there hadn't yet been an Ursula LeGuin for Ursula LeGuin to follow (well, perhaps not in SF&F).
u/Meneth32 [+2] (15 hours later)
I'm not fond of the totalitarian government in this (and many other) Asimov stories. I wonder if he wrote it as a critique on Soviet Russia, or if he actually believed such a system was... good.
u/None [+5] (20 hours later)
Totalitarian? The government described more resembles the WW2-era and Cold War-era West.
I think you need a clearer spectrum from "no surveillance ever" to "totalitarian dictatorship".
u/Meneth32 [+2] (20 hours later)
In this instance you have total government control over all education and scientific research. Citizens aren't told at all about the latter, or that any other system of education existed. Independent rationalism would be impossible in such a society.
Other Asimov stories have different variations on the theme. Off-hand I can think of The Dead Past... Perhaps there aren't that many others.
u/None [+2] (21 hours later)
In this instance you have total government control over all education and scientific research. Citizens aren't told at all about the latter, or that any other system of education existed.
How is that entirely different from the present day, in which we have government control over the vast majority of education and research, and citizens are mostly not taught the history of their system of education and research well or at all?
Independent rationalism would be impossible in such a society.
Of course, Education tapes are also totally unrealistic, but I do think independent rationality would be possible in such a society. It's not like the government is stated to squash hobbyists or something.
u/Charlie___ [+2] (a day later)
This seems like a reflection of modernism - the movement that believed that we could create new, better ways to do things out of whole cloth, and that the government could make those things happen.
This belief is true in some cases (water treatment facilities, vaccination campaigns) and false in others (housing design, social structures, human genetic makeup). When modernism went wrong, it was often very overconfident, and very wrong.