The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [11]
He contemplated remaining celibate for the remainder of his days, but having studied Jacques Bertillon’s data regarding sexual activity and death-risk he decided that keeping a string of mistresses was a justifiable expenditure. For this role he was careful to select unusually docile and rational young women, whose looks were only slightly better than average and whose appetites were as moderate as his own.
Three
If I might be permitted a brief historical interpolation here, it may be worth my pointing out that there were several ways in which an ambitious corporate accountant could plan to make a billion dollars in the early years of the twenty-first century. Global Capitalism was newly entered into its Age of Heroes, and those heroes had already reduced national governments to the status of mere instruments. The only significant ideological opposition to the dominance of capitalism during the twentieth century had been provided by Marxist socialism, but the governments which pretended to operate on that basis had been thinly disguised oligarchies or autocracies, all of which had either collapsed or embarked upon programs of accommodation by 2000.
Ironically, the Marxist economic analyses which had avidly anticipated the collapse and supersession of capitalism had been largely correct in anticipating the phases that the system would pass through as it approached that final crisis. Capital had indeed been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while the vast majority of the laborers producing its material goods remained direly impoverished. The inherent revolutionary potential of this situation had, however, been conclusively defused by the clever use of new technologies of production and communication. Mechanical production not only robbed laborers of much of their potential disputative power but also helped to supply the direly impoverished masses with goods that they could never have produced themselves. Mass communication allowed the avarice and envy that had always been the twin motors of human progress to be manipulated in a subtler, cleverer, and more intense fashion than ever before.
With the aid of hindsight, we can now see an apparent inevitability in the fact that the final victory of Global Capitalism took the form of a Cartel of Cosmicorporations, which put an end once and for all to the Era of Competition. We can see, too, that the Universal Cartel did not arrive a day too soon, if it was indeed the only practical solution to the Tragedy of the Commons. Many historians, having taken this for granted, have regretted that some such cartel did not emerge a hundred years earlier, while the big corporations had not yet become entitled to such prefixes as mega-and cosmi-. In another place, or another history, some other solution might have been found which did better service to the glorious traditional ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, but in our world no such solution ever succeeded in making itself credible.
The twentieth century was an era of unprecedented economic growth, based on unprecedented population growth. Production and consumption increased hand in hand, and their increase was exponential. This could not continue indefinitely, because the toll that it was taking on the Earth’s ecosphere could not be sustained. The twenty-first century was bound to see a qualitative change in the pattern, and the momentum of the system ensured that it would begin with a catastrophic Crash. The only issue in doubt was whether the crisis could be moderated in such a way that the world economy could regain a more-or-less stable and sustainable equilibrium, or whether the Crash would be so destructive that a centuries-long period of recovery would be necessary — after which the problem would inevitably recur, and keep on recurring until a sustainable equilibrium could be reached.
Ecology was an infant discipline in the twentieth century, and its interrelationships