Autopsy of a Superpower

By Lee Willard

Toffler warned us in 1970 with the book 'Future Shock' that society can not be changed at the rate we were changing it or people would go, for all intents and purposes, insane. Today his prediction has come to pass and a significant fraction of our population cannot tell what is real, don't believe in truth and may not even believe in reality.

We were only following our ideals, what a good public school education taught us, that life should be fair, that people should have equal rights under the law, that there should be equal pay for equal work. We believed our air and water should be clean. We believed that we should have freedom of clothing styles, hair styles and that we should be set free from status symbols. We had no idea how badly our ideals conflicted with human nature

But we also believed that women should have control of their own bodies and that they should have as much right to recreational sex as men. We believed that people of all races should have equal rights under the law, in the workplace and in other public places. That they should have the same rights to housing and mortgages, schools and grocery stores as anyone.

We didn't take into account how important status is in human life, in many cases, more important than life itself. We didn't know how much hate, anger and resentment those ideals would cause because those ideals lead to a huge loss of status by a very large segment of our population, White males. For two generations that hate and anger has been building until unleashed by a demagogue who will shortly use it to end democracy if he gets any chance at all. He has somewhere between 38 million and 75 million armed followers that we have driven insane to help him carry it out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lee Willard
• Release date: Dec 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005034139

Lee Willard

I am a retired embedded systems engineer and sci-fi hobbyist from Hartford. Most of my stories concern Kassidor, 'The planet the hippies came from' which I have used to examine subjects like: What would it take to make the hippy lifestyle real? How would extended lifespans affect society? What could happen if we outlive our memories? How can murder be committed when violence is impossible?I have recently discovered that someone new to science fiction should start their exploration of Kassidor with the Second Expedition trilogy. To the mainstream fiction reader the alien names of people, places and things can be confusing. This series has a little more explanation of the differences between Kassidor and Earth. In all of the Kassidor stories you will notice the people do not act like ordinary humans but like flower children from the 60's. It is not until Zhlindu that the actual modifications made to human nature to make them act that way are spelled out. To aide that understanding I've made The Second Expedition free.I am not a fan of violence and dystopia. I believe that sci-fi does not just predict the future, but helps create the future because we sci-fi writers show our readers what the future will be and the readers go out and create it. I believe that the current fad of constant dystopia and mega-violence in sci-fi today is helping to create that world, and I mention that often in reviews and comments on the books I read. I also believe that the characters in those stories who are completely free of any affection are at least as unnatural as the modified humans of Kassidor.In my reviews, * = couldn't finish it. ** = Don't bother with it. *** = good story worth reading. **** = great and memorable story. ***** = Worth a Hugo.

Book preview

Foreword: Who Am I to Say

It is common that people in the public eye write books like this that detail their views and participation in events of this nature but what credentials do I have for writing such a book? I’m not famous, I never worked in government service, except for being a draftee in the U.S. Army. I never worked at a Washington think tank, was never even a captain of industry. Lead engineer on a product design team was as far as I got in a career. This is also far from a book, more like a pamphlet or essay in the vein of the founding fathers in the lead up to the American revolution.

My qualifications are simply that I lived thru it all and watched it happen. I was a kid during the Korean war, a draftee during the Viet Nam war and lived thru the entire Cold War. I’ve been in several countries, some of which played small parts in the destruction of the United States, and knew people who came from countries that were very instrumental in the death of the United States including Russia, China, Israel and Iran.

In addition I had undergraduate study in economics, political science, history, anthropology, sociology, psychology and other fields related to the health of nations. I had these studies in the 1960’s and early ‘70’s but I’ve continued reading in many of these fields. Most of it was to flesh out the sci-fi world of Kassidor, not an ideal alternative, but an alternative meant to investigate what it would take to make the world of the hippies real in all its beauty and all of its faults. This was also the alternative society our country was exposed to in the 1960’s, the one we are centuries if not millennia from being able to implement. We must keep in mind that my fiction never set out to build a utopia, but to detail why the hippie vision of utopia could not occur in our time and place. In ‘The Second Expedition’ trilogy in particular, I make that case in fiction. In this I will try to state it as non-fiction. I don’t intend this essay to be scholarly, I won’t be citing references and ‘experts,’ but just relating what I’ve seen with my own eyes and ears.

As it turned out, the fact that the hippie way of life could not function here was already proven in real life before I could bring those stories to the world. My typing skills could never get that written out without the backspace key and insert mode, and by the time that was affordable, we hippies had kids and mortgages, but the changes that era brought are still vexing us today.

I have also closely followed politics and had several friends that were in politics. Thus I knew a lot about the looming problems in our politics long before the mainstream media knew how much trouble we were really in. These credentials do not make me the world’s greatest authority on the problems, but if my life experience can add anything to the current generations, I’m willing to take the time.

The main thing I learned from the politicians I knew was just how deeply racism runs in our country. One of the things they set out to do before running for office at the local level was to find out what local issues were important to the voters. They were almost as dismayed as I was to find out that there was basically only one local issue that mattered at the time. They summed up the voters desire as ‘Keep the n-----s out of my town.’ Too many people saw that as the only factor in their lives. ‘Good schools’ was a euphemism for ‘All White schools,’ ‘Property values’ and ‘Rural character’ were both euphemisms for ‘All White neighborhoods.’ Instead of people clamoring to lower the property tax, the clamored to raise it so ‘Low income’ people could not afford to live in the area. ‘Tough on crime’ really meant ‘Tough on Blacks.’ Subsidized housing was seen as integration and was absolutely forbidden in White communities. It has become so bad today that any growth at all is seen as causing ‘Traffic’ and if you press far enough you’ll find that ‘traffic’ means non-White traffic.

At that time there was one group of Whites who did not share those racist views, and that was young people. I learned early on that people of African ancestry really differ from us only in skin color and the experiences they’ve had. Admittedly, my experiences with them, as a child, were mainly with middle class Blacks who managed to make it to the working class suburb where I lived as a child. But me, and millions more like me, learned the truth at a young age, so that when we came of age we were ready to embrace the civil rights movement to a greater or lesser extent.

The problem is, it is we who were young in the 60’s and 70’s who actually did the most damage by following the ideals we’d been taught in public school. This was way before that study done at Yale on infants only days old that showed that many Whites are instinctively unable to recognize people with African ancestry as members of the same species. Our idealism and our own experience runs counter to that fact and so we lived most of our lives running under the assumption that racism was something that was learned and not something people were born with. The laws and policies enacted in the civil rights era were also designed under the assumption that racism was something that was learned and that may have a lot to do with why those policies have failed.

Only recently has science begun to quantify and detail the mental differences between male and female. Many of us, myself included, thought that any mental differences between the sexes were also learned behavior and not innate. I had to do a lot of changes to ‘The Second Expedition’ trilogy and invent the ‘Peace Plague’ as a further modification to human nature to artificially make the male and female psyches the same in order to make a world where the hippie way of life could actually function. Of course that change in the novels was still well before they were released to the public. The irony of that is that there is growing evidence that the innate differences between male and female are not that big after all.

Thus the two of the main changes in society that the hippies and civil rights movements strove to bring about run contrary to human instinct. There is one change to society that began in that era that does not run counter to human nature, unfortunately that is one of the more problematic changes, the use of psychoactive drugs. As of now, that and clothing styles are about the only changes from that time that are still with us. The sexual revolution has passed, civil rights has made little progress since. Rock music is now a niche market.

In the Northeast we now have civility between the races and near equality under the law, but in some respects this area is still very racist in that we still have township government which is the concrete manifestation of ‘Keep the n-----s out of my town.’ It is the systematic governmental mechanism by which we deny equal education, housing, health care, etc. to minorities in this part of the country. This is because