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Contents

PROLOGUE

From: Introduction to A History of this Planet, by Mentor Hsu Mei Chun, Ministry of Textbooks, 2034.

This textbook, which begins with the Shang Dynasty, shows you how the people of the world have created our present reality. For people create reality, create it constantly and mostly unknowingly. This is indisputable.

It is easier to see in the case of a ruler. A ruler creates a broad reality, within which his subjects create their own realities. He creates to whom he will listen, whose advice he will heed, to whom he will give an order, who to praise and who to punish. He even helps to create what other rulers he will challenge, and who will replace him on the seat of government.

Now I just wrote that a ruler creates a broad reality, within which his subjects create their own realities. And it is true. But the subjects also create the ruler, and thus they create their entire political reality. This creation by a people of its ruler may not be so apparent to casual observation. But look! The Russian people had repeatedly been invaded and preyed upon by outsiders—Ostrogoths, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Varangians, Cumans, Mongols—until they dreaded foreigners. And in their xenophobia, they created czars who created a strong empire, large and costly to invade. And because the Russian people were disorganized and unruly, it was necessary that they create czars who were domineering and often brutal.

In time, however, the czars were no longer effective enough or ruthless enough. In a word, the people's creations were no longer adequate to their need. Thus the people created an intelligentsia, which they then resented. And the hardest and most intelligent and domineering of this intelligentsia called himself Lenin, a man who had borrowed a socio-economic theory from a German named Karl Marx.

Lenin created a social and governmental system called Marxism-Leninism, with an army and a vast secret police to support it. And from this base, through a series of rulers, the Russians created an even larger empire, and a far greater military force, than any of their czars had done. And this government and army ground the Russian people harshly, which they were used to and which was according to their image of how the world should be.

Now let us consider our own people. Their progress through history has been quite different from that of the Russian people. They created rulers who less ruled them than fed off them. Many of those rulers ruled only enough to keep the people domesticated, so that taxing them would be less strenuous and uncertain than preying on some wild population. And by creating such rulers, our ancestors created national vulnerability as well, vulnerability of the whole nation to warlords and foreigners.

Until finally they tired of vulnerability and the abuse that accompanied it. But they were a people resistive to working together beyond the village level. So they too created a great ruler who was overbearing and hard—Mao Tse-tung. Chairman Mao borrowed Marxism-Leninism from the Russians. But because the Chinese people were different from the Russian, and had created a ruler who was unlike Lenin, and unlike Lenin's successor Stalin, the program and government fashioned by Mao Tse-tung was unlike Russia's. And the successors of Mao Tse-tung were unlike Stalin's successors, because the people created them so, and for a long time had been creating a different stage for them to rule on.

Now in another part of the world dwelt another people, the Americans. And they created themselves as a people from elements of many nations, because mankind's gradual creation of itself toward a space-faring socio-economic body called for such a nation in its evolution.

The Americans too were unruly. And because they had created a very different environment for themselves, one not unduly threatened by invasions, they undertook to create a governing system that allowed them unusual freedom to create their own individual realities. Which they did, in greater diversity than any other people. And they created a series of chiefs of government who did not rule but presided. For the American people did not wish a ruler.

But in conjunction with the other nations, the Americans, who were very powerful creators, gradually created a world which was dangerous to them. And being unruly, and lacking a ruler, they began to feel threatened....

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