Fantastic Metropolis

Idleness, which resulted from having a great deal of leisure at one’s disposal, permitted everyone to devote themselves to more thorough and long-term education. Parallelly with increasing the general level of education, there was a final break-off with certain traditional mistaken notions of a spiritual nature which had burdened mankind, even when there was no real basis for this. Thanks to a device obtained from the Overlords, humans gained a direct insight into their own history, and into the period of the founding of all the more important world religions, which was sufficient to have them finally disappear. “Humanity had lost its ancient gods: now it was old enough to have no need for new ones.”

The conditions for ideal material prosperity, or rather a very high standard of living, led to a dwindling of all ideological disagreements and to the disbanding of the standing armies. These global changes, as well as an entire range of smaller actions taken by the Overlords, led to a chain reaction of deep-rooted improvements in the general situation of many areas of secondary significance. The disappearance of state borders created “One World” from Earth and began from the ground up to do away with all race prejudices. The criminal had practically disappeared as the Overlords had the means for almost unlimited monitoring. Mankind had become exceptionally mobile, “and there was nowhere on the planet where science and technology could not provide one with a comfortable home, if one wanted it badly enough.”

Some progress was made without the assistance of the Overlords. With the discovery of a completely safe oral contraceptive, as well as a reliable method for establishing paternity, the human race had finally rid itself of the last vestiges of puritan morals. Finally, the majority of people gained the opportunity to spend a good part of their time on various sports and entertainment in general, so that the whole planet slowly began to look like “a big playground.”

In precisely this state we see the first cracks in the structure of the scientific Utopia—but cracks only for mankind and not for the Overlords, who never saw the Utopia as being the final goal but rather only the means. Although people had finally acquired irreproachable conditions for manifesting their creative potential, unhindered by the many restraints of the old world, idleness as a creative conditio sine qua non began to slowly transform into its negative correlate—boredom.

The course of this regression was reflected on a number of levels, but basically it had a uniform cause. The appearance of the Overlords and their uninterrupted presence had a very inhibiting and de-stimulating effect on Man’s fundamental creative agent—curiosity. There was no longer any sense in wasting the whole lifetime on solving the mysteries of those scientific, artistic and philosophical issues which the Overlords, had perhaps discovered long ago.

This lack of enterprise became most evident in the field of art. “The end of strife and conflict of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art. There were myriads of performers, amateur and professional, yet there had been no really outstanding new works of literature, music, painting or sculpture for generation. The world was still living on the glories of a past that could never return.”

Stagnation in the field of science was partially hidden because there was an unprecedented boom in the so-called “descriptive disciplines” where facts were only collected and collated-so that almost no one even noticed the lack of theoreticians who would organize and link up these facts into a system. “Profounder things had also passed. It was a completely secular age.”

Indeed, the race which had suddenly been guaranteed unlimited freedom and had been presented with inexhaustible sources of various kinds of entertainment—which “by the standards of earlier ages, it was Utopia”—had been so immersed in “the satisfaction of the present” that the anxious question of rare philosophers, “Where do we go from here?”, did not reach them.

While this fundamental issue, just as in all preceding periods, remained on a purely academic level, the cracks in the scientific Utopia of the Overlords began to evoke suspicion among spiritually-minded people where they were most obvious: in the arts. The fact that stagnation had already turned into decadence in this field incited new debates on the motives and policies of the newcomers from space. “Was it possible that despite all their enormous intelligence the Overlords did not really understand mankind, and were making a terrible mistake from the best of motives? Suppose in their altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of Man?”

This first explicit criticism of the scientific Utopia led to the formation of a new Utopia which, indeed, was also founded on scientific grounds but whose ultimate purpose was not material prosperity but rather the return of the lost creative potential of people, who had increasingly turned into “passive sponges-absorbing, but never creating.”