Hyperborean failure modes

[Nithi Kirenion]

(inspired by Harvey's post here inspired by Ari's post here; the general topic was What is the worst aspect of your seemingly utopian con-culture?)

Raikoth is much like Tibet: most foreigners are quite impressed by it as a utopian place of enlightenment and happiness, but would be taken aback if they knew what really went on there to produce and enforce all the serenity. None of what is mentioned in this post is viewed as particularly strange or terrible by Raikothlin; it's just what we know from long experience will revolt foreigners.

On the darker side of Raikoth are its non-representative government, its restrictions on families, its practice of euthanasia, its enforced drug use, its low economic freedom, its practice of banishing malcontents, and its racism and colonialism.

Non-Representative Government

No one is really sure how Raikoth's government works exactly, including high government officials, but everyone is pretty confident it is not even close to a democracy. While the educated elite have some idea what is going on and why exactly government policy is being set by a series of idealized values and prediction markets, the uneducated may have no clue, and them having a clue is not considered necessary for the system to work.

In fact, because it is near-forbidden to speak about politics in the vernacular, in favor of a system where one can only speak of controversial matters using the specialized philosophical language Kadhamic in which it is difficult to express confused ideas, anyone not smart enough to speak Kadhamic well is effectively locked out of the political process. This may or may not be by design, depending on who you ask. Although all Raikothlin learn Kadhamic in school, this doesn't necessarily have much more of an effect than, say, American high school French classes.

Everyone, including the uneducated, is polled on their values and hopes for the future, but those are transformed automatically into policy. No one in the country has the direct ability to influence what policy the nation adopts. Questioning a particular policy is generally met with a sentiment of "You obviously don't understand the math".

Heavy Family Planning

Contrary to most of the civilized world, where having and raising children is considered a purely personal matter, the Raikothin government heavily regulates childbirth, on the principle that the most important contribution it can make to society is ensuring that its members are sane and healthy. Children are viewed as a national resource, and ensuring that they develop as well as possible and avoid psychological trauma is considered much more important than protecting parents' rights to do whatever they want with them.

Many people are not permitted to conceive at all, including those with genetic diseases (ban lifted if expensive IVF techniques are used), those with psychological problems that would make them a danger to their children, those with a history of violence, and those clearly unable or unwilling to provide for their children (there are very few genuinely dirt-poor Raikothlin; this usually refers to time rather than money)

Giving birth to a child means following relatively restrictive rules aimed at maximizing the child's development; new mothers must comply with medical guidelines on vitamin supplementation and on breastfeeding by law, and are required to either take parenting classes or prove that they don't have to. Social services (technically a division of the Rhavakal) are ready to take children away from their parents at the slightest sign that they are being mistreated; the damage to society from having psychologically scarred children running around is considered much more important than any sort of family ties.

Children older than about six or seven usually wander around on their own with what would be considered scandalously little supervision elsewhere. They are perfectly allowed to live at school, with friends, or in temples, although most choose to stay at home most of the time. This system effectively prevents child abuse or other forms of parent-child conflict after this age; if the parenting is too bad, kids have somewhere else to go.

The Raikothin definition of "child abuse" would probably include at least a third of families in the United States and the rest of the civilized world.

The measures listed above are coercive, but the island also uses non-coercive eugenics to encourage people with good genes to have more children and those with less valuable genes to have fewer. The money given as an incentive isn't great, but over four thousand years it's had a spectacular impact on the average intelligence and attitude of the Raikothin race. Most Raikothin are a little confused that everyone else seems to think this is evil.

Elder Care (or lack thereof)

According to ancient Greek myth, it has always been the Hyperborean custom for the very old - who have accomplished everything they set out to accomplish and are no longer attached to life - to put a wreath of flowers around their neck and jump into the sea. To the Raikothlin, this is a sacred ritual, a means of ending one's life at the time of one's choosing instead of getting gradually more depressed and decrepit and eventually fading away in terrible pain in some hospital bed. To foreigners, it looks like "Oh my gosh, they kill old people!".

Certainly it is not impossible that some old people who don't wish to die have felt pressured to end their lives by the general societal expectation of doing so (although there is no formal requirement). And certainly the amount of money and time saved by not having to take care of the very elderly is very substantial. Raikothlin themselves vehemently deny accusations that these considerations factor into their tradition, but foreigners are not so sure.

Drugs and Biochemistry

Raikothin believe that the human mind, when left to itself, is generally faulty and prone to problems. They correct these with the liberal use of psychotropic drugs. The ones most foreigners would have heard of are LSD and MDMA, but other, more obscure ones are equally important.

Contrary to rumors spread by Babkhans and other enemies of Raikoth, we do not go around in a constantly drugged state. We try for chemical interventions that can be done a few times and have permanent effects; we values these chemicals not for the temporary high they give but for the long-term changes in brain chemistry they produce.

Certain other chemicals are given semi-permanently; these include nootropics, neurotransmitter precursors, and various vitamins (especially vitamin D, which doesn't form naturally in the high latitudes of our island). These are generally prescribed on an individual basis by the priesthoods after considering the biological and genetic differences in the metabolism of each person.

Other countries accuse us of sedating our citizens. I would point out first that the average person on a standard regimen of Hyperborean drugs is far from sedate, and second that there must be an optimum biochemistry and there's no reason to think it was the one we were born with.

Low Economic Freedom

I'll admit it: Raikothlin are scared of economics. Economics tend to involve a lot of people doing what they think they want, then noticing after fifty years that they've spent their entire lives working in a cubicle in a hideous gray office building with a two hour commune and are terribly unhappy. The Raikothin philosophy is that if people doing what they want makes them unhappy, they should be prevented from doing what they want on the grounds that they don't really want it. Make sense? No? Most of the necessary terms are in Kadhamic and hard to explain.

Lots of economic development is simply prohibited on the grounds that it will lead to nothing good. Cars are almost completely banned on the island, and even trains are viewed with suspicion; as a result, Raikothin travel slowly, but their cities are beautiful, quiet, pollution-free, compact, and liveable, and there's no such thing as suburban sprawl. There's no Hyperborean-language television station, and although a TV-like medium is available on the Internet, Raikothin broadcasting is pretty terrible.

Many other things are just plain taxed out of existence. Businesses are taxed in accordance with their size, and it's almost impossible to have a business with more than ten employees (exceptions include huge government-sponsored enterprises that can't be done on a small scale like Lirikoth Yyitek). Income is taxed so progressively that it forms an asymptote around the equivalent of about $700,000 per year; no one in the country can get much richer than that.

The death tax is almost 100%, so it's very difficult, maybe impossible, to leave money to your children. Some people even have trouble leaving the family business to their children, although this should not happen and the laws are being altered to prevent it.

As a result of these economic restrictions and a general low-tech lifestyle, most Raikothlin have a lower "standard of living" than their neighbors elsewhere, and there's also a huge urban-rural divide.

Banishment

The Raikothin government tolerates a certain level of dissent as genuine good-faith attempts to improve the government. But if people become too unhappy, or commit an act not quite criminal enough to deserve banishment to the monasteries in the Cold Waste but criminal enough that it can't be allowed to stand, or if they just don't fit in, they tend to be politely approached about the possibility of moving to one of "the colonies". If polite doesn't work, and if the problem continues, more and more pressure may be placed on them. Most people go willingly; if they are that discontent with Hyperborea they will usually be happy to leave it behind.

"The colonies" used to mean the small Isle of Valsikoth just south of the main Hyperborean isle. By now, Valsikoth is almost as Hyperborean as the big island, with differences so small as to seem silly to outside observers, and the real discontents end up in Cimmeria, Bjorngard, and Wintergleam. This system not only creates a large Hyperborean minority in the colonies that binds them to the motherland, not only creates a class of colonial administrators out of the very people most tempermentally suited to the foreign world, but also tends to serve as shock therapy for the discontents - they see other lands so foreign and so barbaric that they paradoxically become more attached to Hyperborea, and usually mellow their rebellious ways.

Racism and Colonialism

Probably the most typical Raikothin vices are racism and colonialism.

The Raikothlin views the entire rest of the world about the same way the average American views a mob of Middle Easterners yelling DEATH TO AMERICA over a cartoon - as a bunch of scary, violent people who want to do terrible things for inexplicably reasons. Some of them may be nice enough as people, but get them together and they'll start acting in unpredictable and dangerous ways.

Immigration to Raikoth is very low, and tends to be through the auspices of the Vankarha Sui Mek, the outreach organization that tries to convert the rest of the world to Raikothin values. Those who satisfy the VSR that they share Hyperborean values and outlook can move to Raikoth freely - as long as they speak fluent Kalas Perelin, at least a little Kadhamic, and are familiar with hundreds of small rituals that Hyperboreans know since childhood. Raikothlin will treat these immigrants with fascination and shock but no particular malice. Anyone who tries to get to the island without the approval of the VSR won't even be able to get a work permit let alone any kind of permanent residence. The colonies are more forgiving, and foreigners with an interest in Raikothin culture usually head to Cimmeria or Bjorngard.

The colonies themselves are controversial, but the Raikothlin see themselves as civilizing and pacifying the world one small area at a time. To their credit, they are relatively enlightened rulers, without any massacres or destruction of the native culture or anything. But they do impose their own values and they are willing to get rid of anyone who doesn't play by their rules.

They have mostly been successful in Bjorngard, where Yyphrosde is now a city-state along the Hyperborean model. They have been much less so in Cimmeria, where the Hyperborean city of Tielion Arumbe is mostly set apart from the natives, who continue to resist Hyperborean rule either actively or passively. Nevertheless, they sell themselves short a little in Cimmeria; the entire country, including the anti-Raikoth elements, is far more civilized than it was in the days before they arrived.

Elsewhat

I didn't include the problems centering around the Priesthoods because research is not quite done in that area yet. Suffice it to say there is a large power differential between those who enter the Priesthoods or the other Orders and those who do not, and selecting people for the Orders is always controversial.

[Icebreaker]

SO YOU'VE STILL NEVER TRIED LSD YOURSELF, HUH?

[Jonas]

This gives me a total different image of the Hyperboreans. I don't think many civilizations reach the point in which they openly admit their darker side. Look to Kildare, the counts are proud on their reputation as warlords. The writer of an article like this would probably end up in jail, or just excluded from society.

On certain points it gives me a '1984' impression (from George Orwell). Intriguing.

[Harvey Steffke]

Way to steal my idea and then write the whole thing up while I was at work. Not to mention I have Civ 5 that's distracting me. Still, I've gotten around to starting this on my own end too. Nelaga's failure modes aren't quite as dramatic a Hyperboreas, but maybe that's because we're human beings and not some sort of freaky blue-skinned cult! I hope to write a big Nelagan vs Hyperborean mindset comparison when this is all over.

[Falkner van der Sluijs]

Jeez, my fox-people are more normal than you freaks

(although still not without quirks of their own, which I should write about sooner our later)

[Jonas]

Not to mention I have Civ 5 that's distracting me.

Civ V, you say? Is bit a lot better then Civ IV?

[Harvey Steffke]

I never played IV. But I do like some various assorted changes in V from III and SMAC. You can't stack armies anymore so you have to surround enemies and cities instead of just building up a super-stack of units that nobody can attack. Indirect fire does a lot more damage, but it's really vulnerable, so you have to bring units that can put up a good melee fight too, encouraging mixed armies. And cities auto-defend themselves and can bombard targets of their owner's choice so even if a city has 0 defending units it can still put up a good fight, especially in early game. There's also more than 7 civs in larger maps and twice as many "city states" as civs, which act as mostly neutral factions that you can manipulate into giving you stuff or take over violently if you like the location or something. So the world feels large and complicated, which is great.

But there are things I don't like too. The game is so - so - SO slow paced. I played for like half a day when first got it and barely made it halfway through the tech tree. It takes forever and a freaking day to build units and city improvements, which makes every one of them ultra valuable since you can't replace them without major hassle. And I don't think I've quite figured out how to spend gold on stuff without paying full price. Plus the tech tree just kinda stops at modern day, which I find kind of lame. They could have at least tried to predict the future a little.

And no scenarios. Me loves scenarios.

I'm not sure practically how much I'll get to play. A single game eats up more time than I ever have available.

[Jonas]

Mmm, yes, I see. Doesn't sound too bad (except the slowness and the lack of scenarios). I will think about it when I see it in a store (and look to the price). Thanks.

[Demon of Fides]

Jeez, my fox-people are more normal than you freaks

(although still not without quirks of their own, which I should write about sooner our later)

Please don't. After today, I don't think my mind could take it.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Harvey: I agree with you about the pace, but I've found several solutions. Number one, go to "quick" game speed at the settings. Number two, have waaaaay too many civs for the map size you want. Number three, there are mods that increase the yield of all resources - download and add them. That usually takes care of the pacing pretty well.

[Jacobus Loki]

The Hyperboreans aren't freaks. They've found something that keeps there society content. I don't want to live there, but I'm glad it's there, and that its mostly on our side.

How about sending old folks who don't want to jump in the ocean abroad? An island run by the terminal, for the terminal? Should be a considerable set of skills available. Jumping on the boat could be an alternate ritual.

[Ari Rahikkala]

The Hyperboreans aren't freaks.

Scott, I think you failed at your attempt to make Hyperborea sufficiently weird

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Scott, I think you failed at your attempt to make Hyperborea sufficiently weird

Usually I'd agree, but let's remember that this is a Bonapartist faux-Hawaiian Yardistani with a faster-than-light spaceship who claims descent from Loki saying this, so his definition of "not a freak" might be more elastic than that of the general population