Mallworld, Incorporated: Bound Together (eBook)

Book II of the Mallworld-ReBound Trilogy

Jeffery Zavadil (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
244 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-1471-2 (ISBN)

Infos

After winning Mallworld's first democratic election, Jime, Sam, and ReBound battle Executive propaganda in the media and crackdowns in the streets. Discontent seethes in the sprawling, dystopian shopping complex, which has oppressed humanity since the eco-collapse. ReBound's philosophy of political interconnection is spreading, but will the movement survive when a key leader is assassinated? Exploring political theory through a fictional dystopia, Mallworld, Inc: Bound Together tries to answer the question, 'How can people be free in a world of modern communications and information technology?'

Textauszug

Chapter 2

Myths of the Outsider

Sid was at home in his kitchen cutting lettuce. As the ReBound director of research, he had been working long hours, and tonight Jime had sent him home early, insisting that he try to achieve a better work-life balance. Jime had also convinced him and his wife Angela to make healthier meals and had shared some of his recipes. The HV was on, and a news anchor was reporting Sam’s remarks about workeys. “ReBound is now talking about workey immigration. ReBound leader Samantha Gomprez said today that workeys should live inside the Mall, not just on a short-term basis to do temp jobs, but permanently to, quote, ‘enjoy the fruits of their work.’” Sid rinsed his hands and dried them with a towel, then reached for the remote to turn up the volume. The segment proceeded to display expensively dressed pundits opining about ReBound’s stance on workey migration and integration.

“If we open the floodgates, a tidal wave of these people will drown us,” said one commentator.

“Wave after wave of them will come,” said another.

“We’ll never be able to stop the flow, it will engulf us,” said yet another.

Sid ran a hand over his bald head and thought about these metaphors. “Floodgate.” “Tidal wave.” “Drown.” “Flow.” “Engulf.” They were all metaphors of water and flooding, and Sid knew they were ancient metaphors to frame migration. The imagery expressed the menacing, destructive force of an out-of-control torrent that could overwhelm and destroy entire communities, cities, and cultures. Metaphors of “invasion” and “horde” had also long been used to negatively depict refugees, implying grave danger.8 But, Sid thought, they were only metaphors. They were only images that existed in people’s heads. And they did not reflect reality accurately, but magnified the perceived dangers. There was no flow. There was no flood. There were only people who traveled, one by one or in small groups, across man-made boundaries—national borders, in the ancient world, or through the Mallwall from Outside to Inside today. Just people walking, or sometimes going by car or truck. That’s not actually a flood; that’s just people walking. Flood and water metaphors seem to work as explanations for movements of populations because they allow the mind to visualize the movement of large numbers of individuals as the motion of one fluid thing, which is mentally easy to grasp and describe. But these metaphors also inaccurately implied unruliness, peril, and destruction. Better, Sid thought, not to think of migrants in terms of a flood of water at all. Just think of them as people.

Sid felt frustrated that anti-migrant sentiment was not based on empirical evidence or historical examples of actual migration and integration. Instead, it was driven by negative metaphors like “migration is a flood” that framed how people talked and thought about the subject. These metaphors were emotionally powerful, but usually went unexamined—they were a kind of prejudice, in both the Burkean and modern senses of the term: unexamined thoughts that were also bigoted. Sid knew that metaphors were a necessary and essential part of human cognition—indeed most human language and thought was metaphoric—but metaphors also had to be fittingly suitable depictions of reality, not misleading ones. And metaphors about entire groups of people should not depict them as a negative, destructive force of nature. That was dehumanizing.

Sid knew the history of the Old United States and thought how its experience with migration was germane. The O.U.S. had been founded on two original sins: the conquest of Native Americans and the enslavement of African people forcibly imported into the New World. After the early European colonists had decimated the native peoples, making room for expansion, the American nation-state successfully accepted and integrated many groups of migrants into its predominantly English culture, and over time became more open to diversity, in fits and starts. These migrant groups included Germans, Italians, and Eastern Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century, Mexicans and other Latinos at the turn of the twenty-first, and others from around the world throughout its history. Eventually America got pretty good at integration. It didn’t occur without problems and prejudices, but compared to other existing nations, the O.U.S. developed a relatively multicultural, cosmopolitan society.

One brutal and tragic exception to integration concerned black people: African Americans were unjustly oppressed and excluded for the entire history of the O.U.S., a failure of equality and inclusion that the country never successfully rectified. Sadly, it lasted right up to the Washington Going Out of Business Accord that deeded Mallworld its geographic territory, a permanent stain on the country’s moral record. In the O.U.S., people like Jime, Sid thought, had been second-class citizens, whereas today he thought of Jime’s skin color the same way he thought of Sam’s hair color—as a superficial trait irrelevant to their basic humanity. Elimination of anti-black prejudice was only achieved in the post-American world, when Mallworld started afresh and addressed old prejudices with its Great Synergy pro-diversity advertising campaign.

For non-black migrant groups, however, integration into the O.U.S. had followed a pattern: the first generation made a difficult and dangerous trek across land or sea to get to America and, once there, worked hard so that they and their children would have better lives. While many in that first generation learned the new language and cultural norms, some did not and mostly kept their old ways. These pioneers’ children then generally grew up bilingual, crossing cultural boundaries and making friendships and relationships that bridged both cultures. The third and later generations were well-integrated into the larger society and were accepted as part of the mainstream cultural mosaic. Although there were sometimes tensions and difficulties for people in the early stages of this process, these tensions were mostly manageable, and overall it was an effective way for people from different cultures to mix. Over time this diversity had strengthened O.U.S. culture, making it dynamic, creative, adaptable, and resilient. In short, the history of immigration was one of people building connections with one another across cultural lines as generations proceeded to create a diversity in society that strengthened it.

Mallworld was even more diversified because it had let in people from around the world as the natural environment died, and then it ramped up capitalist absorption of elements of their different cultures for creative exploitation, to sell as commodities. To prevent destructive identity-based conflict within the single structure of the Mall, the Great Synergy Campaign had used advertising techniques over the course of a few decades to dissolve group identities based on race, nationalism, and religion, and had thereby achieved interpersonal acceptance, at least within the rules and boundaries of the class differences fundamental to capitalism.

But now Sid was watching the pundicrats on HV use a discourse of dread about workey integration into Mallworld, a discourse rooted in pejorative metaphorical terms that he knew could only sow fear, revulsion, and division among listeners.

“Think about this massive flow once the dam is opened,” one said. “Now, I’ve got nothing against workeys as people. But they are uneducated; they have a different, some would say lower, culture; they don’t have a good work ethic; and they lack self-discipline. They’re noisy. They don’t belong Inside.”

“That’s right. And no one here is a racist, but we do have certain standards Inside the Mall, and we don’t want the place polluted.”

“Crime rates—public disturbance, vandalism, theft, violent rape and assault—are higher in workey temporary housing when groups of Outsiders are brought Inside for temp jobs.”

“It’s a kind of moral pollution, dirty and disgusting.” This was said with a turned-up nose.

“Ugh. It would degrade our way of life.”

Sid thought that this was indeed disgusting—not the workeys, but the pundits’ bigoted attitudes toward them. They had taken the “flowing water/flood” metaphor, added the idea of pollution, and were describing workeys as an uncontrollable source of moral filth, triggering their own psycho-somatic disgust reactions. Thus the justification of their own prejudices was entrenched in the very language they used and in the very images inside their heads, even as they insisted they weren’t racist. In reality, if workeys were lacking in education, social skills, or discipline, it was because of the social conditions they endured and the opportunities they were denied—not because they were morally filthy. They were not disgusting but oppressed.

The “flood” and “filth” metaphors for migration embedded prejudice right into people’s language. Sid knew that it would be a widespread mental barrier that ReBound would have to overcome. The general lack of critical thinking in Mallworld disheartened him. But he believed that exposing these ideas and stressing how misleading and damaging these images were would eventually weaken their hold on people’s minds; and cultivating people’s sense of connection with others, including Outside workeys, would...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.7.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-1471-9 / 1098314719
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-1471-2 / 9781098314712