Reflections

I recently finished the first of a trilogy by Chinese author, Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem. Even if you are not a fan of so-called Science Fiction, I highly recommend this book for its insight into the human condition, and its relevance to what we are witnessing in our country and the world at large.

The narrative arc is complex, so with apologies for a very simplified explanation, allow me to condense the thread I found so pertinent to our present situation. An advanced alien race, the Trisolarians, are facing the eventual destruction of their planet as a result of the unpredictable interactions of their three orbiting suns causing periods of extreme heat or freezing cold. While the loss of their home planet is predicted to be thousands of years in the future, the Trisolarians mount an effort to search for a stable inhabited planet.

Through a series of incidents a message broadcast from Earth announcing its presence and welcoming other intelligent beings to respond is intercepted by Trisolarian listeners. Due to its frequent intervals of instability Trisolarian science and technology, though far beyond Earth's, took exponentially longer to advance while Earth's achievements unfolded over mere thousands of years and the rate of progress from an agrarian society to the age of information has been doubling at a fantastic pace. Recognizing the imbalance that would surely lead to a superior advantage for Earth in an inevitable future conflict, the Trisolarians immediately launch their battle fleet for the four hundred year journey and in the interim undertake a plan to destabilize Earth's scientific progress.

It is at this point that Cixin's plot begins to resemble the actions now underway to eliminate or vastly reduce scientific research and education in the US. The Trisolarian effort to retard Earth's advancement relies on some technological trickery to introduce randomness in the results of scientific experiments around the nature of matter and energy confounding the development of new technology. It also introduces propaganda and sabotage efforts by a fifth column of Earth influencers who have been led to believe or simply embraced the idea that the Trisolarians are a god-like, beneficent race come to save Earth from its destructive inhabitants. One must believe that Cixin is an astute observer of the fundamentalist religions, climate change deniers and anti environmentalists that are waging a similar war against humanism while promoting policies that are destroying our planet.

Despite the belief in a benign Trisolarian leadership, Cixin reveals their true intent in an exchange between their ruler and one of his advisors. Questioning the need to eliminate the human race rather than assimilate them, the Trisolarian ruler observes human's propensity to commit violence against one another, a behavior he attributes to their emotional instability. Trisolarian culture in contrast evolved quite differently due to their ability to read each other's thoughts, but with a concomitant elimination of any which excite their senses; the only way they could endure in the harsh reality of their planet. For this reason, Trisolarian society developed no art, music, literature, nothing that we might associate with the highest aspirations of human existence. Trisolarians lack the capacity for self reflection, for empathy, but are willing to practice deceit in the interests of their own survival.

It is tempting to conclude that Trisolaris is a projection of what our own society might devolve to, or has already for those who embrace the present path of xenophobia, intolerance, authoritarianism and economic warfare. Those who believe in a benign leadership captaining evident chaos might reflect on Cixin's tale, but I suspect its lessons would be lost on them. They believe in a triumph of technology over humanism, and have embraced the radical elimination of democracy to achieve an accelerated evolution of capitalism, an oligarchic rule by corporate states.

In his coda to the Three Body Problem, Cixin observes the irony that we humans find harmony and peacefulness in the stars, while we treat each other with hatred and suspicion. Neither extremism of any kind, or numbing ourselves to what is happening around us will alter the current trajectory. Our country was founded on ideals at the center of which was the rejection of imperialistic tyranny, and the embrace of the individual over the state. We abandon those values at our peril and far worse, at the expense of generations to come whose birthright we will have forfeited.