The Sirian Experiments by Doris Lessing Page B

or present! Yet most societies – cultures – empires – can be described by an underlying fact or truth, and this is nearly always physical, geographical. Is it possible that our reluctance to regard ourselves as we do others is because we do not like to categorize our own existence as
physical … merely
physical?
    The Sirian Empire has been preoccupied by one basic
physical
fact and the questions caused thereby since its inception: technology: our technical achievements that no other empire has ever even approached … I write that statement without the benefit of ‘hindsight’. That is how we have seen it until very recently. It is because of how we define (and many of us still do)
technology.
The subtle, infinitely varied, hard-to-see technology of Canopus was invisible to us, and therefore for all these millennia, these long ages, we have counted ourselves as supreme.
    We now mark the end of our Dark Age at the point where ‘we got rid of our excess populations’. As I saw it expressed in a somewhat robustly worded history. At the point, then, when ‘population balanced necessity’. Ah yes, there are a hundred ways of putting our basic dilemma! And each one of these formulations, evasive or frank, can only mask something we have never come to terms with! To sum up our culture, then, as we so arbitrarily encapsulate others: ‘The Sirian Empire, with its fifty-three colonies, almost infinitely rich, well-endowed, fruitful, variegated, and with its exemplary technology, has never been able to decide how many people should be allowed to live in it.’
    There you have it. I touched on this before: how could I not? There is no way of even mentioning Sirius without bringing up this our basic, our burning, problem …
    The Dark Age over, we saw to it that our populations everywhere were reduced to the minimum level necessary for …
for what?
In our enthusiasm over our new concept, our new capacities of control, we set fairly arbitrary limits to population on our fifty-three colonies. Very low numbers were permitted to be.
    What happened to those teeming millions upon millions upon millions? Well, they were not exterminated. They were not ill treated. On the contrary, as I have hinted – to do more than lightly sketch these developments would come outside my scope – all kinds of special schemes and projects were set up to soften their tragic fate. They died, it is generally agreed now – now that so much time has passed and we can look atthose days more calmly – of broken hearts, broken will. They died because they had no purpose, of illnesses, of epidemics that seemed to have other causes, and during mass outbreaks of madness. But they died. It took fifty thousand years of our bad – our
very
bad – time, but at the end of it, we were left with nearly empty planets, and everything open for us – ready for a magnificent new purpose, new plan.
    But, in fact, nothing had changed:
we still did not know how to look at ourselves.
Our technology was such that our entire Empire could be run with something like ten million people. That was what was
needed.
If to run our Empire was our purpose, and nothing else …
    I shall not go on. Some people will say I have already said enough about this; others that, if I were to pay proper and due respect to our terrible basic dilemma, I should devote not a few paragraphs but several volumes to it.
    Well, myriads of volumes and whole ages have been devoted to it – when our stage was, as it were, swept bare and empty, waiting for its appropriate dramas, what happened was that schools of philosophy sprang up everywhere, and nothing was heard but their debates, their arguments … What was our purpose? they inquired of themselves, of us, pursuing ‘the fundamental Sirian existential problem’.
    So violent, lowering, unpleasant, became these debates that it was made illegal to even mention this