Tyranny – the Small Scale
The leading man on our project must be introduced at this point.
Demetrius Harkness was the founder and principal stakeholder in the parent company, Harkness Research. He had founded the firm for the sole purpose of scientific research with the ultimate goal of profitable patents.
He had sold a quarter of his shares to obtain the funding for HIM, the Harkness Immortality Mission, a subsidiary of Harkness Research.
He had found it necessary to sell another 10% of his shares when the schedule and expenses for HIM stretched beyond original projections. Although he still held the controlling interest in Harkness Research, this additional need for funding added fuel to the fire that was his ambition.
To call Demetrius a “scientific researcher” makes the purpose of the Harkness Enterprises sound far nobler than it actually was. “Exploitative explorer” would be a comparable term if he were a discoverer of new lands, or “self-seeking spiritualist” if he were in the field of religion.
Actually, even those terms are too kind. A “slave driver” in the literal sense sounds more accurate. For him, people were without value other than a means to an end.
Even the name of this new subsidiary showed Harkness’ egomaniacal bent. Investors considering the Harkness Immortality Mission as an investment must have been somewhat skeptical of the immortality aspect. I had encouraged he name it the Harkness Longevity Project, but he said that was too bland. Besides, HLP was a poor sounding acronym.
My attraction to the mission of Harkness’ subsidiary, Harkness Immortality Mission, was the sense that we would make life better for humanity through increasing lifespan. Having always been a bit liberal in the sense of desiring improved conditions for the whole of society, this appealed to me.
And here I mean “liberal” in the sense of being focused on the well-being of all humanity, as opposed to the nominally conservative approach with a focus on the well-being of the individual.
The thought that the two extremes were not so much antithetical as they were two sides of the same coin had never occurred to me in the past. I was beginning to see differently. Yes, a coin has to have two sides, and they cannot be the same. The sides are both necessary and they meet in the middle.
Demetrius (I would prefer to refer to him as Harkness, but that confuses the man with the company, an illusion that he enjoyed creating) had a talent for playing two sides against each other to get the best work from both to achieve his goals.
The carrot that he held in front of each employee turned out to be smaller than the stick held to their backside. But it is well known that we are more motivated by fear than reward, even if that fear makes us less productive.
He held forth the hope of the future to the idealist and the prospect of great financial gain to those with a more practical nature. At times we seemed to have a blue team versus a red tem, the theorists versus those who applied the theory. Somewhere in between, possibilities were exchanged for practicalities.
But this conflict seemed endemic to our culture.
In every field from politics to medicine the corporate culture of business dominated. The “we” was often composed of a very narrow group or even an individual, essentially a “me” mentality.
Meanwhile, the champions of the inclusive concept were marginalized for their lack of a realistic goal.
For example, Demetrius had once commented that Rachel’s talents would serve best if utilized to find a cure for the autistic children rather than trying to treat them individually.
“The cure, the cure! That is where her work should be,” he once told me. He had gone further with an example: “If the beach is littered with dying starfish, don’t go throwing them back in the sea one by one. Clear the beach with a front end loader and dump them back into the sea by the hundreds! Save the masses rather than wasting time handling every individual.”
Never mind how many were crushed by the front end loader. This was an unspoken side effect.
And that is how he saw it all: masses; numbers; things. Losing sight of the individual people behind the statistics is all too easy as numbers change the people into inanimate pieces on a game board.
I began to realize the tension between following Demetrius’ vision of a uniform population versus Rachel’s talk of the varying needs of individual children. Demetrius’ way turned our future over to technocrats like me who crunched numbers for the masses. The unique needs of the individual were ignored while the masses in the middle of the bell curve were our target.
The bell curve is a favorite of those who see life as a statistician’s dream. The shape of the curve is like a bell. There are small areas under the curve at both ends and a rise to a rounded peak in the middle.
And that is the problem: For any given issue, an individual might be in the middle or on the tail end of the bell curve.
When there are a large number of issues, it is likely for an individual to be ignored because of being in the tail of at least one of the bell curves.
Exceptions ruin the theory, and exceptions are the rule. And not every distribution is shaped in this manner. But he found it more practical to assume that events were always distributed in this uniform manner.
Essentially, Demetrius and the Harkness approach ignored a large number of people as “high cost, low value.” I began to wonder how he would feel if he found himself in the tail of one of these bell curve distributions, just another unfortunate individual whose needs would be ignored for “the greater good” of the individuals in the middle.
What an evil term, “the greater good!” This has been the cry of every majority, every tyranny, even if they used different words.
Paul was Demetrius’ opposite and probably the most valuable employee at Harkness. He served as a sort of buffer between Demetrius and the employees, shielding them as much as possible from Demetrius’ tirades and impulses.
One other aspect of Paul’s life was that he loved sailing. This love, coupled with his role as buffer between the owner and the employees, earned him the nickname Quartermaster.
On pirate ships (an appropriate analogy to our company, now that I think about it), the Quartermaster was second in charge to the captain, and he represented the crew before the captain. In battle, the captain was in sole charge, but for routine sailing of the ship and running the affairs of the crew, the Quartermaster was in charge.
That position must have often felt like being between a rock and a hard place for Paul. His seemed a thankless position.
Yes, Paul loved the sea. He probably had seen little of it except perhaps through a window since Demetrius had found it necessary to sell more shares to raise funds.
Summing up my own job, I was to balance efficiency and effectiveness, that is, to have sufficient resources (neither more nor less) available to accomplish the goal set before us. This is a razor thin line if it exists at all.
Only in retrospect do I see the artificial nature of our whole enterprise.
Our established goal was to achieve immortality for humans. We would achieve this in increments measured in years. Any increase in longevity was counted as a successful advance toward our goal.
But we never measured the quality of that increase in lifespan.
Never did we measure the cost of the increase in terms of our relationship with our resources or our environment.
Never did we seek to understand why this might not be beneficial and how future generations and relationships would be impacted.
And there were a thousand other questions unasked and unanswered, including the most important question: What is our purpose here?
The entire culture had been conditioned to believe our purpose was to create a greater civilization. This was defined in materialistic terms such as less labor and more automation, more control over nature and the elements, greater works of art and the imagination, and a seemingly endless list of other “power over” and “for our benefit” statements.
But our purpose has never been to force every other aspect of creation to serve us, to use everything else as disposable means to accomplish our desires.
Our purpose always has been to serve and protect the garden around us. We are to enable every person, every animal, every plant, and every object to give of its abundance and to share in the reward of the divine purpose thus achieved.
Instead of sharing the abundance, we chose to separate into tribes fearful of lack.
Any obstacle to dominion over “the other” – be it people, animals, disease, or even social conditions such as poverty and abuse – was met with a declaration of war.
Every obstacle was a nail, and every solution was the hammer appropriate for that nail.
Going into the home stretch of our research on overcoming mortality, the pressure only increased. This is why I had found it necessary to stop my interaction with Reese. Even if playing provided relief for me and allowed me to do my work better, from Demetrius’ viewpoint it was a waste of my time. Actually, he considered my time as belonging to him since he considered that paying my salary gave him ownership of me.
Next chapter
The leading man on our project must be introduced at this point.
Demetrius Harkness was the founder and principal stakeholder in the parent company, Harkness Research. He had founded the firm for the sole purpose of scientific research with the ultimate goal of profitable patents.
He had sold a quarter of his shares to obtain the funding for HIM, the Harkness Immortality Mission, a subsidiary of Harkness Research.
He had found it necessary to sell another 10% of his shares when the schedule and expenses for HIM stretched beyond original projections. Although he still held the controlling interest in Harkness Research, this additional need for funding added fuel to the fire that was his ambition.
To call Demetrius a “scientific researcher” makes the purpose of the Harkness Enterprises sound far nobler than it actually was. “Exploitative explorer” would be a comparable term if he were a discoverer of new lands, or “self-seeking spiritualist” if he were in the field of religion.
Actually, even those terms are too kind. A “slave driver” in the literal sense sounds more accurate. For him, people were without value other than a means to an end.
Even the name of this new subsidiary showed Harkness’ egomaniacal bent. Investors considering the Harkness Immortality Mission as an investment must have been somewhat skeptical of the immortality aspect. I had encouraged he name it the Harkness Longevity Project, but he said that was too bland. Besides, HLP was a poor sounding acronym.
My attraction to the mission of Harkness’ subsidiary, Harkness Immortality Mission, was the sense that we would make life better for humanity through increasing lifespan. Having always been a bit liberal in the sense of desiring improved conditions for the whole of society, this appealed to me.
And here I mean “liberal” in the sense of being focused on the well-being of all humanity, as opposed to the nominally conservative approach with a focus on the well-being of the individual.
The thought that the two extremes were not so much antithetical as they were two sides of the same coin had never occurred to me in the past. I was beginning to see differently. Yes, a coin has to have two sides, and they cannot be the same. The sides are both necessary and they meet in the middle.
Demetrius (I would prefer to refer to him as Harkness, but that confuses the man with the company, an illusion that he enjoyed creating) had a talent for playing two sides against each other to get the best work from both to achieve his goals.
The carrot that he held in front of each employee turned out to be smaller than the stick held to their backside. But it is well known that we are more motivated by fear than reward, even if that fear makes us less productive.
He held forth the hope of the future to the idealist and the prospect of great financial gain to those with a more practical nature. At times we seemed to have a blue team versus a red tem, the theorists versus those who applied the theory. Somewhere in between, possibilities were exchanged for practicalities.
But this conflict seemed endemic to our culture.
In every field from politics to medicine the corporate culture of business dominated. The “we” was often composed of a very narrow group or even an individual, essentially a “me” mentality.
Meanwhile, the champions of the inclusive concept were marginalized for their lack of a realistic goal.
For example, Demetrius had once commented that Rachel’s talents would serve best if utilized to find a cure for the autistic children rather than trying to treat them individually.
“The cure, the cure! That is where her work should be,” he once told me. He had gone further with an example: “If the beach is littered with dying starfish, don’t go throwing them back in the sea one by one. Clear the beach with a front end loader and dump them back into the sea by the hundreds! Save the masses rather than wasting time handling every individual.”
Never mind how many were crushed by the front end loader. This was an unspoken side effect.
And that is how he saw it all: masses; numbers; things. Losing sight of the individual people behind the statistics is all too easy as numbers change the people into inanimate pieces on a game board.
I began to realize the tension between following Demetrius’ vision of a uniform population versus Rachel’s talk of the varying needs of individual children. Demetrius’ way turned our future over to technocrats like me who crunched numbers for the masses. The unique needs of the individual were ignored while the masses in the middle of the bell curve were our target.
The bell curve is a favorite of those who see life as a statistician’s dream. The shape of the curve is like a bell. There are small areas under the curve at both ends and a rise to a rounded peak in the middle.
And that is the problem: For any given issue, an individual might be in the middle or on the tail end of the bell curve.
When there are a large number of issues, it is likely for an individual to be ignored because of being in the tail of at least one of the bell curves.
Exceptions ruin the theory, and exceptions are the rule. And not every distribution is shaped in this manner. But he found it more practical to assume that events were always distributed in this uniform manner.
Essentially, Demetrius and the Harkness approach ignored a large number of people as “high cost, low value.” I began to wonder how he would feel if he found himself in the tail of one of these bell curve distributions, just another unfortunate individual whose needs would be ignored for “the greater good” of the individuals in the middle.
What an evil term, “the greater good!” This has been the cry of every majority, every tyranny, even if they used different words.
Paul was Demetrius’ opposite and probably the most valuable employee at Harkness. He served as a sort of buffer between Demetrius and the employees, shielding them as much as possible from Demetrius’ tirades and impulses.
One other aspect of Paul’s life was that he loved sailing. This love, coupled with his role as buffer between the owner and the employees, earned him the nickname Quartermaster.
On pirate ships (an appropriate analogy to our company, now that I think about it), the Quartermaster was second in charge to the captain, and he represented the crew before the captain. In battle, the captain was in sole charge, but for routine sailing of the ship and running the affairs of the crew, the Quartermaster was in charge.
That position must have often felt like being between a rock and a hard place for Paul. His seemed a thankless position.
Yes, Paul loved the sea. He probably had seen little of it except perhaps through a window since Demetrius had found it necessary to sell more shares to raise funds.
Summing up my own job, I was to balance efficiency and effectiveness, that is, to have sufficient resources (neither more nor less) available to accomplish the goal set before us. This is a razor thin line if it exists at all.
Only in retrospect do I see the artificial nature of our whole enterprise.
Our established goal was to achieve immortality for humans. We would achieve this in increments measured in years. Any increase in longevity was counted as a successful advance toward our goal.
But we never measured the quality of that increase in lifespan.
Never did we measure the cost of the increase in terms of our relationship with our resources or our environment.
Never did we seek to understand why this might not be beneficial and how future generations and relationships would be impacted.
And there were a thousand other questions unasked and unanswered, including the most important question: What is our purpose here?
The entire culture had been conditioned to believe our purpose was to create a greater civilization. This was defined in materialistic terms such as less labor and more automation, more control over nature and the elements, greater works of art and the imagination, and a seemingly endless list of other “power over” and “for our benefit” statements.
But our purpose has never been to force every other aspect of creation to serve us, to use everything else as disposable means to accomplish our desires.
Our purpose always has been to serve and protect the garden around us. We are to enable every person, every animal, every plant, and every object to give of its abundance and to share in the reward of the divine purpose thus achieved.
Instead of sharing the abundance, we chose to separate into tribes fearful of lack.
Any obstacle to dominion over “the other” – be it people, animals, disease, or even social conditions such as poverty and abuse – was met with a declaration of war.
Every obstacle was a nail, and every solution was the hammer appropriate for that nail.
Going into the home stretch of our research on overcoming mortality, the pressure only increased. This is why I had found it necessary to stop my interaction with Reese. Even if playing provided relief for me and allowed me to do my work better, from Demetrius’ viewpoint it was a waste of my time. Actually, he considered my time as belonging to him since he considered that paying my salary gave him ownership of me.
Next chapter