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"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Inurbanity (Inurbane) | ||
| Criminal penalties for persons who are unable to behave properly in crowded cubic cities. |
| “What,” smiled the doctor, sadly, “is a poor official to do? On the one hand I must brave your displeasure or, on the other, I must release upon Society a man who really, on two counts, is not urbane.” "What is this 'Inurbanity’?” I asked. “When people crowded together in cubic cities,” answered Doctor Gray, “We found that it was possible to commit a great many offenses for which there was no law. We therefore made laws against such things as hawking and spitting, giggling, loud laughter, talking in raucous voices, bad temper and a thousand other like matters. These laws could not be enforced. Any good lawyer could clear his client; for they are all matters of degree, dependent upon manner, time and place. Yet any one who did not choose to keep them could make all comfort quite impossible for hundreds round him. A few such men and women, comparatively a few, could have destroyed our rising new civilization. Therefore we lumped these things under the head of Inurbanity.’ People with 'Ists’ and ‘Isms’, criminals, people mentally ill without being quite insane, people incurably boorish and stupid, people with complexes and phobias, people deformed, all people, in short, who bother others too much and will not or cannot change, are classed as ‘Inurbane.’ In a safe, simple, painless way they are made incapable of bearing children and are confined for life in humane institutions outside the city. Most of the institutions are almost empty. We have no longer any criminal classes. We have no insane, no idiots, no crippled or deformed, no one with inheritable diseases, no drunkards nor drug-addicts and very few extremists of any kind.” “Also no rebels, I suppose,” said I, “and no reformers.” “Plenty of both,” bowed the doctor. “Cartex here is a great rebel against dramatic conventions, and every new scientific discovery means drastic reforms ; but every rebellion anH reform must be courteous and urbane.” |
| From The Cubic City,
by Louis Tucker, D.D.. Published by Science Wonder Stories in 1929 Additional resources -
|
This passage reminds me of the sentiments expressed by Lee Kwan Yew, the long-time leader and founder of the remarkable nation of Singapore:
"Mine is a very matter-of-fact approach to the problem. If you can select a population and they're educated and they're properly brought up, then you don't have to use too much of the stick because they would already have been trained. It's like with dogs. You train it in a proper way from small. It will know that it's got to leave, go outside to pee and to defecate. No, we are not that kind of society. We had to train adult dogs who even today deliberately urinate in the lifts.”
“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbor is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think...”
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