2 Keep it simple.

2 Simple Infrastructure and Simple Politics.

The Professor Draws The Parallel Between Simple Infrastructure and
Simple Politics.

["My thesis is that the closer a governmental system can get to putting the
people first, and the state last, the closer a country is to workable truth."
.. quoted from The Professor.]

The transporter slowed and edged down towards a large building filling an
entire block at the edge of Bontown, capital city of The Good Country, then it
settled gently on the landing pad on the roof. In what seemed like no time at
all, Jack and the Professor were through the passport and customs procedures
and in the lift to the street-level of the building. They walked directly to
the front taxi of the several lined up in a covered rank outside the building,
and were whisked away silently to their hotel.

Truly:- Amazing! This is an electric taxi?

Professor:- Yes … all the taxis, busses and light-rail transporters in the
city and town areas are electricity-driven, either by overhead wires or by
onboard batteries or fuel cells. It was a deliberate decision to inhibit the
use of fossil fuels. There are petrol and diesel vehicles mainly for use in
long-distance travel, but even there battery power is used mostly.

Truly:- But there are such limitations in battery driven vehicles — the best
can only cover about two hundred kilometers at most?

Professor:- Necessity is the mother of invention! They handled it in a simple
way. All vehicles are designed to fit one or more standard battery packs of
four 42-volt batteries. Service stations have packs on charge and swop them
out with vehicles as required — just like filling up at a gas station.
Front-end lifters — battery-operated, of course! — change the packs in a
shorter time than filling up. When hydrogen cells become more readily
available, it will be a simple matter of adapting them to the vehicles, and
the service stations will serve up hydrogen cartridges instead. There is a well-staffed research unit looking at emerging technologies all the time.

Truly:- To generate the electricity — I suppose they use oil or coal burners
for that?

Professor:- Actually, they don’t. Neither do they use atomic fuel. What they
can’t generate by water power, they generate by wind, and they also have an
extensive network of solar panels feeding electricity into the power grid. On
the west coast where the seas are highest, there is also a significant
wave-powered generator. The use of tidal-surge power is also more than experimental at this stage, it is starting to make a useful contribution to the the
electricity needs of The Good Country.

By this time the taxi had pulled up in front of the hotel. They booked in and
met a little later in the lounge for refreshments. From where they sat they
had a good view of the spread of the city including the terminal building
where they had landed earlier.

Professor:- You can see transporters taking off and landing at regular intervals.
All the internal, and some external, air travel is done in airships like that,
because there are no landing strips for normal aircraft anywhere in the
country except at one International Airport at the coast. Internally, every
city and town of any size has a terminal centre to handle air traffic as well
as being the station for the rail links and long distance road passenger services.

Truly sat studying the scene in silence for a while, taking it all in.

Truly:- They are a very sophisticated people.

Professor (with a good humoured laugh): Actually, they are not … not
if you use sophisticated in the dictionary sense of being highly developed and
complex; of depriving a person of his or her natural simplicity ; or of making
something artificial by worldly experience. That’s what I brought you here to
see — how they have adopted a system which allows society to flow in it’s
most natural rythms, but placing restraints upon abuse of humans, animals and
nature. It is sheer unsophisticated simplicity!

Truly:- You really surprise me, Professor. I would have thought that the world
had advanced in its total philosophy, including the science of government.

Professor:- One would think so, but that is the common trap mankind falls into.
We build on the immediate past experience without thinking that somewhere
there may be a flaw in the structure. Some people call this ‘the baggage’ we
bring with us into every situation — we judge what we see by what we think we
know rather than by going back to fundamentals that never change.

Truly:- But surely that’s called progress. We must be building a better future,
which means everything is better than it was before?

The Professor studied him for a while, formulating his response.

Professor:- Okay — that is the barrier in you that we have to get past. That’s
why I brought you into this different place so that you can see as well as
hear. The way-to-go for all the world seems to be defined by the one phrase
‘Democratization.’ But what is democracy? There are various forms of it, and
sub-forms, and broadly speaking they range between centralisation of control,
and distribution of facilitation. Here is a statement by an eminent scholar,
Sir Desmond Lee, in his Preface to his translation of ‘The Republic’ of Plato:

“Plato’s .. tendency is to argue from the state or community to the individual
rather than vice versa. He is inclined to decide first what he thinks would be
socially desirable, and then to cut the individual to fit it, rather than to
think of the individual first then consider how his needs can be met.”

Truly:- I’ve read Plato’s Republic, but I didn’t pick that up. I suppose it is
very significant. How does our democracy fit in?

Professor:- Somewhere along the line — it is a continuum, you see. My thesis
is that the closer a governmental system can get to putting the people first,
and the State last, the closer a country is to workable truth. When you think
about it, the form our — any — democracy takes is an end result of the
comparative aggressiveness of the leader(s) and the indifference of the
people. The indifference in the people is a reflection of their passivity –
the unwillingness to fight — but that does not excuse leaders who take
advantage of their own people for their own ends.

Truly:- Surely the more civilised leaders are sufficiently enlightened and can
be trusted to guide the politically-unsophisticated masses? Our government at
home works alright. Leaders must know what is best for all of us?

Professor:- Leaders know what is best for you and me? — Our western
democracies certainly seem to work, but remember that the norms set by those
enlightened leaders are heavily undergirded by a mass of legislation designed
mainly to protect the State against the citizens rather that to guard the
citizen against undue demands by the State. If falls into Sir Lee’s category
of democracy which works from the State to the individual. It is controlling
society to a large extent rather than facilitating it.

After a spell of silence, Truly came back to the beginning of the present
discussion.

Truly:- I lost track here, Professor. How does this fit in with the Terminal
Building and the transport systems?

Professor:- Well, you thought they were a sophisticated people with
sophisticated technology, but no — the basis of their transportation — which
of course facilitates communication between people and people — is that the
less processing is needed the better for the environment and, therefore, the
better for the people. Water, wave, tide, wind and sun power require minimal
processing to produce useful power. That’s the connection — let the
people-in-community settle for what they need rather than having ‘what is good
for you’ fed down from a central controlling body. The less sophisticated the
social structures, the more freely can the people interact for their common
good.

By this time Truly had enough to think about, so they each retired to their own
suites to rest and freshen up before dinner.