Jerusalem Demsas: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s his rival, Sabul, who more or less makes him leave because he can’t publish the idea on the communal planet, and they all think he’s a traitor for leaving. They throw rocks at him. One of the rocks hurts his shoulder, even. He wonders, when he’s coming back, if they’ll even let him back in or put him in prison or maybe even kill him. It sounds quite fraught to me. We’re hearing about that planet, or moon rather, from the vantage point of people who believe in it. But once you see through their descriptions, to me it sounds much worse than even the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, you could keep your kids, right? That was just understood. [laughs] I think there’s a comment made by a woman that Shevek, our protagonist, meets on his travels, where she says that it’s better to have the conflict outside of your head than to have the conflict within yourself. When you are forced — as they are in his home planet — to never be able to openly confront the political problems because the assumption is there is no hierarchy, there is no government, so there’s nothing to confront. Which makes it actually quite difficult to confront the very things that are causing distress, and they realize that the real problems are within all of their own collective minds about what are social norms or rules that are actually concerning them. From my perspective, yes, there can be a lot of things around social norms and rules and things that are allowed to be spoken about that can stifle and reduce freedom. But nothing can be more stifling than the state itself creating violence against other people, which we see on the capitalist planet. They’re having a proxy war. There’s an invasion of another country, which is meant to be an allegory to Vietnam, I suppose. There’s a real present threat of danger and violence, which Shevek has not really felt except in a brief fight that he has early on when he’s a youth on his home planet. To me it’s just like, yes, there are serious problems, but it seems — They do shoot at the more radical syndicalists on the communal planet, right? Then Shevek realizes, “Oh, this is what our army always was about.” There’s this pretense that there’s no government, but in fact, things are centrally planned by a computer à la Daron Acemoglu, I suppose, and a lot of it just doesn’t really seem to be as it’s advertised.…

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