The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. Doris Lessing

years, since the last war, when Volyen fought a dissident group from Sirius which planned to use this weakening Empire as a possession from which to begin its own adventure in Empire – fought and won, but at heavy cost, because that ‘victory’ in fact weakened it and left it unable to recover – since then, the educated youth have had to face a very difficult future. Yet the education is still largely based on the past: that is, on a conviction of Volyen moral superiority over lesser breeds. Year after Volyen year, the youngsters emerge from the training establishments with all the equipment, practical but mostly moral, for running, administering, advising, ruling others, and find their occupation gone. Also, because of the savagery of the war with the Sirian dissident group, because of the lying propaganda on both sides, so soon to be exposed by ‘life itself,’ these successive generations of the youth have had a valuable but painful education in de-conditioning, in the use of their minds in analyzing propaganda, that of their own side as well as that of any enemy.

      It was as a result of that war that a new mode or pitch or style came to characterize the training establishments of the young on Volyen, one that would previously have been impossible. It was a savage and angry criticism of their own elders, but a cynical criticism as if nothing else could be expected. It was a sneer expressed not only in the tones of a voice, but in characteristic shrugs of the shoulders, a superior tightening of the lips accompanied by a nod and the lowering of eyelids, as if to shield the associate or accomplice from the tedium of thoughts whose banality of course was not one degree better than has to be expected. The flavour of course pervaded these interchanges. Of course this incompetence, this indifference to public good, this venality, this corruption; of course the lies of skilled and cynical propagandists had to be expected. But not endured … For over the horizon, no farther than the next star and its friendly planets, was Sirius. Sirius the new civilization. Sirius the great and the good, the hope of the Galaxy. For the absolute readiness to see nothing but evil in Volyen was matched by a need to see everything good in Sirius.

      And the Sirian agents, everywhere even then, noted this new mood among the youth, the future class of public administrators (though few of them would in fact find such work in the dwindling Empire of Volyen), and reported to the representatives of Sirius on the near planets, who then reported to Sirius (in the hands of the junta who had supplanted the Five) that the entire youth of Volyen, sickened by the flagrant corruption of the ruling class, revolted by the depredations of their Empire (you will recall that Sirius was again in the grip of fantasies about its own nature as a ruling power, and saw itself only as a source of virtues), were only too ready to betray their planet and become agents of Sirius. This without money, for the most part; without reward, other than that of a conviction of Duty well done; and purely out of idealism and love of Progress and Future Harmonious Development, not only of local galactic populations, but of peoples through the Universe … You will forgive me if from time to time I seem infected by the style.

      That war of thirty V-years ago was truly horrible. A developing technology introduced new and awful weapons. The Sirian Rhetorics, and the Rhetorics used as counterforces by Volyen, were sickening. On Volyen there is a time when the young are able to see through local Rhetorics, though this is usually for only a short period before they have to earn a living and thus to conform; before they can be accepted as members of a governing class – and thus must conform; and now, when there is so small a governing class to belong to, before they join one or another of the innumerable political groups, each with its own Rhetoric, which they cannot afford to criticize, for if they do they will forfeit membership in the group, which is their social base, the only base they have for friendship. For Volyens, evolved so recently from animal groupings, for the most part cannot function outside groups, packs, herds, and each of these has its own verbal formulations which are sacred; they can be changed, but only with difficulty, and while they are being accepted cannot be questioned.

      Rhetoric rules these youngsters again, when they have sought to escape from it. Shedding the Rhetoric of Empire, which they are prepared to analyze with acumen and to reject with scorn and contempt, they become prisoners of the Rhetoric of oppositional groups whose only aim is to become, in their turn, rulers who will govern through Rhetoric. Through the formulation and manipulations of words.

      Sirius, skilled in group psychology, in manipulation, in the uses of ideology, knew how to subvert the young people at just that moment in their lives when they had turned their powerful youthful scorn on the Rhetorics they were refusing.

      On Volyen these youngsters became Sirian agents in considerable numbers. This, long before it became part of the public consciousness that Sirius was a real physical threat, might actually physically invade and conquer; though why it was so difficult for Volyens to accept that it is hard to say, since they had themselves overrun and stolen other planets so recently. No, how these young people saw themselves was not ‘I am paving the way for an invasion by Sirius,’ which struck them as a laughable idea; but ‘I stand for the noble true, and beautiful ideas of Sirius, which will transform this shoddy and pitiful and corrupt and lying Volyen into something not far from a paradise. These ideas will abolish the already disintegrating Empire of Volyen, and the sooner the better, for empires are wicked and disgusting. Sirius stands for the ever-upward march of evolving galaxies. Sirius means Justice! Truth! Freedom!’ (And so on ad nauseam.)

      While hundreds of thousands of ‘the flower of Volyen youth’ have been dreaming of the virtues of Sirius, the fact is that this Empire is at this stage as brutish a tyranny as we have ever seen. At various times of expansion in the past, Sirius has simply decided that a certain planet would suit its purposes, sent in its armies, established a ruling base, exterminated those who resisted, and adjusted the economic conditions to its advantage. But under the influence of all this ‘Virtue,’ the pattern has become more like this. A planet lying somewhere in the path of expansion becomes next in the line of conquest. Agents and spies enter it in all kinds of guises and spread information about the advantage of Sirian rule. This operation is a mixture of purest cynicism and purest muddleheadedness and creates maniacs by the planet-load, for it is necessary both to know that the conditions you are describing conform to the classic descriptions of tyranny anywhere at any time, and yet to believe that these constitute ‘Virtue.’ Local populations ‘believe’ at first in these fairy tales about Sirius to a greater or lesser extent. When Sirius invades, there is a core of believers ready to commit any crimes against their own people for the sake of ‘Virtue.’ They form part of the new ruling machinery. Some, if not most, soon become disillusioned as they see what horrors are being perpetrated around them, and these are at once murdered. Others, blinding themselves, become willing tools of Sirius. The wealth of the colonized planet becomes available to Sirius. This process, of course, is nothing like the well-planned, thought-out processes during the times of the Five, who at least understand long-term planning of an economic kind, if nothing higher. No, all is muddle, confusion, inefficiency. Miserable exploited populations, refused any means of protesting, have to listen to the chants of self-praise of the Sirians and their local captive minds. Anyone who tries to use language accurately to describe what is in fact happening vanishes into torture rooms and prisons or, diagnosed as mad, into mental hospitals. There is soon a sharp division between the masses and the small, obedient governing class, one living in direct poverty, the other given every advantage. A major occupation is the fabrication of verbal formulations to disguise this very ancient organization of a country and to describe it as some sort of Utopia; a large part of the time and energy of the administration is concerned with nothing else.

      That is the truth of all the Sirian colonies near Volyen. They can be described as prison planets. If this Report were to be stretched to twenty times its length, I could not begin to give an idea of the suffocating, lying, claustrophobic atmospheres of such planets: the poverty, the misery, the exploitation of every possible resource for the benefit of Sirius.

      Meanwhile, on Volyen, a thousand groups of energetic, educated youngsters base their hopes for the future on the Sirian rule; and, as every year the training establishments spill out their occupants, they form new groups, new societies, new parties, all with one idea, to make Volyen ‘like Sirius,’ though each group chooses a different example from the near planets to use as inspiration. For, of course, information comes out from the Sirian slave planets about their real condition; unable to jettison the dream, these groups will at