Time Will Run Back - Book Report/Review Example

Time Will Run Back The author divided this work, which originated in the early 1950s, into three parts. Only three decades earlier, 1919-1920, America was in the midst of a progressive period known as the “red scare.” The Red Scare was the fear that America would be taken over by communistic practices, principles, and ideas. It developed such panic and furor that anything and everything deemed 'unpatriotic' was automatically labeled communist, as well. In Hazlitt's book, a futuristic world where the communists have taken over America exists. In a nutshell, the unknown son of an anarchist and dictator, Peter Uldanov a/k/a Stalenin II, comes to power through the untimely death of his father, Stalenin I. Throughout the book, very artistically-crafted threats of overthrow and murder are mixed in to intrigue the reader. Bolshekov, known as Number Two, is slated to take over the American Republic of Wonworld in the event of Stalenin I's death. Stalenin II (Peter) spends nearly the entire book debating, philosophizing, calculating, and planning, with cunning, a masterful plot to turn the communist Wonwold (a/k/a post-Communist America) into a capitalist nation, only no one want to call it capitalist. Peter is introduced to the reader as a man who has spent his entire life in another world never knowing that his father is a dictator. He meets his father, a stroke victim on the verge of impending death, and through his talks and teachings begins to discover a centrally controlled government where economic class systems has been changed to “functions.” People who do not function or who threaten Wonworld's existence and supreme order are easily and immediately “liquidated.” Part I: LOST Peter Uldanov's father, Stalenin I, says, “I know all about your tutors. Their function was to protect you from any real knowledge of the modern world.” He tells his son that the education and training of his mother's world was a jaded and unsophisticated kind of teaching meant to protect him from the “real” world. Peter is very curious and has many questions about this “new” world. He is exposed and then treated like a newborn foal who has no clue. His early adventures, as he progresses into leadership, allow him to meet a woman in whom he takes a modest romantic interest. Everyone has a number instead of a name, but her name is Edith, he discovers. She lives in a concentrated apartment-like camp arrangement with shared living quarters. Six or seven others live there, including her father, a partially disabled man. In these compartments, there is no such thing as privacy or private bathrooms, another sad state of affairs of communistic living, the writer implies. Says Edith, “It would be a pretty state of affairs...if everybody were allowed to read the books kept over from the old poisoned capitalist civilization. Putting all sorts of subversive notions into people's heads! Only a small trained class can be allowed to read those books.... Edith is a representation of the training that work units who have numbers but no names have been prepared for all of their lives. They are die-cut stamps who produce, have no lives of their own, and no real reason to do more than barely survive. It is form of slavery, except that it comes with pay in the form of ration tickets. The tickets are based on the functions, which is similar to classes, but the communist system is in denial that functions and classes of people are the same thing. Edith tells the reader that the education systems are made only for those “good enough” to have access to them, everyone else just needs to work and produce. The following chapters of this section depict Wonworld as “lost” because the entire social caste system is now a system of labels, numbers, and functions. No one uses their real names, they have limited freedoms, and they are never free to live the way they see fit instead of the way the government, or the state, fits them. The entire premise of Wonworld is based on fear and dread of loss of even their ability to function and survive. This fear drives their corner of the planet and has, in fact, taken over the entire world. These minds are trained to fear, but also to learn only that which the state wants them to know to keep it operational. The leaders are not real leaders, because they, too, operate out of fear rather than trust. It is a lost world by western standards of capitalism. People are not allowed to marry and scapegoats are chosen to make an example of so that no one gets the idea that anything will ever change. Unsurprisingly, Edith and her father soon become scapegoats, courtesy of Bolshekov, in order to appease him for Peter's perceived treachery of Wonworld. “Blessed are they without responsibilities. Blessed are they who do not have to make decisions, who have all their decisions made for them...Liberty meant responsibility...To be free to decide meant that you had to decide. And you had no one to blame for the result of bad decisions but yourself.” Part II: Groping Peter prepares for his father's death, looks for Edith, and learns how the communist system of Wonworld works. He spits out numbers and calculations without the use of either computer or calculator and he appears to be a financial wizard and mathematical genius because of his earlier exposure to his mother's guarded teachings. There is a blending together, or groping for, what makes sense about communism and what does not; and what makes sense about capitalism and what does not. In his reconfiguring of the communist world, we see a world that is not so cut-and dried while preferring one extreme over another. However, the author warms the reader to the idea of capitalistic thinking without calling it capitalist. “Not everybody can be a manager, or an actor or an artist or a violin player. Somebody has to dig the coal, collect the garbage, repair the sewers. Nobody will deliberately choose these smelly jobs. People will have to be assigned to them, forced to do them." Wonworld is hypocritical in the sense that those who would not want to do certain jobs will be forced to do them. It is a slavery-type system that has no real benefit. What is hypocritical is that the freedoms the leaders want are the freedoms others are not allowed to have. “...control over a man's livelihood, over his means of support...means...control over all his actions and...his speech. To deprive him of economic liberty is to deprive him of all liberty. Where the State is the sole employer, each man must...refrain from doing or saying anything that will offend his superiors who constitute the State...everything [is] calculated to please his superiors who constitute the State.” What we discover is an American Republic on the verge of famine and the son of a dictator who is challenged to resolve the problem before it gets worse. Some goods are over-produced, some under-produced, and the mathematics of Wonworld have proven to be a waste, as well as a hypocrisy. People do not care about production because their lives are no better whether they produce more or less. The end reward and “pay” is the same. Peter attempts to build, or rebuild, an incentive-based system built on conglomeration of production, effort, and reward. We soon see that the capitalist world that existed before is the very world that Peter, or Stalenin II, is trying to reintroduce. In truth, the democrat republic of America has not proven to be much better than the communist world except for freedom of choice. The flaws of a merit-based system which relies on favoritism, nepotic relationships, and leveraging of class advantages and privileges, is almost as uninhabitable as the communist world. However, the writer seems to prefer one over the other by saying though there is no such thing as a perfect world, there is a numeric way to make it more productive and efficient Give people back their names and number the capital goods (the produced means of production that is a cyclical and repetitive function of production) instead. In essence, groping is looking for real answers to a hypothetical world; a world held in trust by government powers who should only appear when there is a dispute. Other than that, only the people get to decide in which direction to take Wonworld. After the arrest/kidnapping, of Edith and her father, the next high adventure happens when Peter himself, Stalenin II, ends up taking a man's life to preserve his own and to protect himself from Bolshekov who is now on to him and his “preposterous” plans to change the protectorate regime. Part III: Discovery In this section, a resolution, as well as a revolution, must take place. The strange political bedfellows of a free society are mixed in with the conclusive devise of handling inherent humanistic competition between workers and industry. Under a merit-based system, people earn what they receive, it is not simply given to them. Also, monopolies are not allowed because they disallow the spirit of competition, and competition makes it easier to mark off any goals for selfish gain and replace them with the greater gain of people over profits. Ideally, in the 1950s, this was how it was supposed to work. We have come to the New Millennium world of the early 2000s and discovered the idealism of 1950s America not to be as cut and dried as that. However, the “new” world, now called Freeworld under Stalenin II's direction, forces Peter to create a system of competition, and a voting system which outlaws and overrules dictators. He knows that his democratic-capitalist-socialist ride has to come to completion. In Freeworld, it is important to protect profit and the newfound rights of a very suspicious people at the same time. The people do not trust because they are trained to think in a way that believes that any new ideas will get them killed and that they are only patsies for entrapment. There is an old adage, “one man's rights end where another's begin.” In the new free market economy that Peter envisions, government and state interference is extremely limited and the goal is to de-centralize the system, which forces the people to rely on one another instead of the state in order to keep it functioning and self-renewable. People live, things function. Inherently built into this system, however, is a flawed belief that people will treat one another right and do right by one another, and that is seldom the case when it comes to money and profits. CONCLUSION “The tremendous problems he faced now were dominantly political...how could he prevent each of these provinces from falling into the hands of some petty tyrant or dictator?...The leaders must be freely chosen, and peaceably removable, by the people...He must begin by making the central government of Freeworld a model of a popular representative government. He must begin by risking his own leadership. In the end, Peter must give up his own leadership in order to put Freeworld on the path to true freedom, and the rest would have to be worked out by the people. They would need to decide for themselves, by popular vote, who would operate the new system from a “hands off” approach. Though it seems abundantly clear that Peter will make a good leader, or even a great leader, the people will not know who is a better or best leader until all hats are placed in the ring for a quasi-democratic scuffle. The American Republic of Wonworld, n/k/a Freeworld, must see it, participate in it, and freely discover their own place in it. Read More