"I am not understanding what you mean by strangeness," said Bao.

The Questioner seated herself comfortably, quite willing to educate a willing listener. "All societies maintain themselves by forcing personal behavior into a mold or pattern which the society calls its 'culture.' The patterns are imposed by natural or political conditions; for example, either recurrent drought or recurrent persecution can result in similar patterns. Most patterns require changes in behavior, and that requires changes in belief systems, or vice versa, sort of chicken and egg as to which comes first.

"So a few thousand years go by and the climate changes, or the politics, but the people still follow the same taboos because by now they believe their deity ordered them to do it. Long-practiced behaviors that started as a response to conditions, always fossilizes into 'traditional values', that is, the only 'right way' to do things. At that point people no longer use the system in order to survive, the system uses them in order to survive. That's something people often don't understand. Systems are parasitical, they have a life of their own, and they, too, evolve and change and try to servive. The one fact that is true of all cultures, without exception, is that it never represents the free desires of the people who are jammed into it even when people are conditioned from childhood to accept uniformation."

"Really?" asked Ellin. "Never?"

Questioner grinned at her. "Only mavericks live in accordance with their desires, and even they don't often get away with it. They are usuallly labeled as troublemakers and gotten rid of. So, when the Questioner arrives on a new planet, the people show us the culture. Here, they say, is what we are, we have nothing to hide. Genetic variation, however, guarantees that sometimes a rebel will be born, and you may be sure the culture has come up with a way to deal with him.

"So, in order to find out what's really going on, we investigate how the culture reacts to threats, we look for the people who do not fit, we look for the oddities, the strangenesses. When we have enough of them, we learn what the bones and nerves of the culture are really like, beneath the skin."

"But you're saying all cultures are coercive," said Ellin in a troubled voice.

Questioner laughed. "But Honorable Ellin, of course they are. This is what makes reading history so amusing. Most cultures think of themselves as free while regarding others as coerced. They do so because they are following 'traditional values,' and the generations of coercion that resulted in those values is long forgotten. On Old Earth, in one society, women rejoiced that they were 'free' to have children, when in fact they had been coerced into excessive reproduction by a profit-driven culture that required a growing population. Men felt they were 'free' to ingest deadly substances or own deadly weapons, when in fact they were coerced into desiring them by industries that had to sell weapons and drugs to survive. Weapons, poisons, and large families were all parasites on the population. The people weren't free, they had been molded into consumers, which is what the mercantile culture needed.

"Such things can be most amusing," she said with a chuckle.

Sheri S. Tepper, Six Moon Dance
Copyright © 1998 by Sheri S. Tepper. All rights reserved.

Posted 15 April 2000

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