Time Will Run Back

Chapter 38

ANOTHER year passed. A state of war still existed between Wonworld and Freeworld, but it was still a war without battles and without bloodshed. It consisted of a tremendous barrage of propaganda and of feverish preparations for a resumption of the active war that everyone regarded as inevitable.

Adams contended that this propaganda war was a losing one for Freeworld. The propaganda of Freeworld, he insisted, was heard only by the people of Freeworld. Nobody in Wonworld was allowed to listen to the short-wave broadcasts of Freeworld on penalty of death. And in any case, nobody outside of the Protectorate in Wonworld had a radio set.

“This means that only the people whose business it is to answer us know what our arguments are,” said Adams. “On the other hand, more and more of our people are acquiring radio sets, and you allow them to listen.”

Peter’s chief answer was a tolerant smile. “That’s our system,” he said, “and I intend to stick to it. Means determine ends. We would end up with as bad a society as Wonworld, if we merely aped their methods.”

“If we don’t do something soon,” retorted Adams, “we will end up with a victory for Wonworld. Bolshekov will start bombing us the moment he thinks he has achieved air superiority. He will have all the advantage of surprise and disruption. We have the planes to bomb him now. If we don’t get the jump on him, he will get it on us.”

“I won’t resort to those methods,” said Peter. “I still hope to get peace by convincing Wonworld that our system is better than theirs.”

Adams threw up his hands in despair. They had been over this argument too many times.

But he conceded that Peter had been brilliantly right about the advantages of his new free system. Both of them continued to watch its development with undiminished fascination.

It was not merely that it out produced the communism of Won-world to the point where there was no comparison. This increase in production was itself merely a symptom and consequence of something more deep-seated.

The whole spirit of the people had been transformed.

Peter noticed this daily even in the attitude of small storekeepers toward their customers. There was none of the indifference and surly boredom that had marked the office-holding storekeeper under the socialism of Wonworld. These people waited on customers not merely with courtesy but with eagerness. It was not only that every sale meant a personal profit to them. Every sale was also a confirmation of their foresight in making or stocking certain goods, in correctly anticipating the wishes of consumers, or in anticipating these wishes better than their competitors did.

Under socialism there had been only one center of initiative, at the top of the hierarchical pyramid. Everybody else had merely carried out orders; he had made what he was told to make or stocked what he was told to stock. When he had filled an order, he had done it as a favor to the customer. It had been always the customer, not the seller, who said “Thank you.” The customer was always supposed to be grateful because the commissars of Wonworld had graciously consented to order the making of the rationed goods. Neither the good nor the bad guesses of the commissars were considered to be the concern of the local storekeeper himself.

But under this new free market system every sale was a sort of personal triumph for the storekeeper. The decision what to make or to stock, and the task of persuading the customer that this article was as good as or better than what one’s competitors had to offer (a task in the long run impossible unless the article actually was as good or better), had all the adventure and excitement of playing a fascinating game. And though success, as in a good card game, might be sometimes due to luck—to the fall of the cards—in the long run it was the result of shrewd anticipation and skill in playing one’s hand.

True, the hired salesmen in a store did not, as a rule, show quite the alertness and eagerness of the proprietor. But as they were usually under the watchful eye of the proprietor, and as their promotion and salary depended on their success in selling, most of them were incomparably more alert and accommodating than most socialist jobholders had ever been.

This competition in serving the consumer ran through the whole society. It did not show itself merely at the point of sale. Long before that point, manufacturers, enterprisers and inventors vied with each other in thinking up new products that consumers might want, or ways of making old products better or selling them more cheaply. There was a spate of new inventions such as Peter had never dreamed possible. Some of these, it is true, were mere gadgets, often ridiculed by Bolshekov’s propaganda ministry and even by writers in Freeworld; but if they were really useless, if they filled no real and permanent want of consumers, they were soon unsuccessful. Time and the consumers kept weeding out what was merely meretricious and selecting what was best.

There was also competition in advertising; and the sometimes extravagant contentions of rival sellers were also the butt of Bolshekov’s propaganda and of writers in Freeworld. But the Free-world government kept this to a minimum by tightening the laws against fraud and the misrepresentation of goods.

Even without these laws, Peter pointed out to Adams, the mischief of fraudulent advertising would not begin to compare with that under socialism. For under socialism no one was permitted to ridicule or even question the claims of the state. The claims of the state went unchallenged precisely because there were no rival claims. But when manufacturer A announced that his soap was the best, and manufacturer B asserted that his soap was the best, and manufacturer C swore that his soap was the best, it was clear to the consumers that all three couldn’t be right. This competitive advertising bred a healthy skepticism in the consumers and even a remarkable skill in weighing rival claims. It was found that in the long run, in fact, people judged a product by the product itself. For the great majority of products, the most skillful advertising soon proved to be impotent if the product itself was not good.

Under socialism, on the other hand, consumers had no choice between competitive products. The product itself was nearly always bad, because the state had a monopoly of making it and a monopoly of advertising it. No competitor could arise to displace it with a better product. No one could throw doubt on the state’s advertising claims by rival advertising of another product. There was no one to restrain the state itself when it misrepresented its products, as the leaders of Wonworld always did.

But in the private competitive system that Peter had introduced, the bad or indifferent product was constantly being supplanted by the good, the good by the better, and the better by the best. No one could afford to rest on his past laurels; for though his product by its merits might dominate the market today, it might be threatened by a better product tomorrow. Even the corporations whose products already led the field maintained research laboratories to keep ahead of possible new competition.

The advertisers contended that they increased the pace of industrial progress by bringing new and better products to the attention of consumers sooner than consumers would otherwise learn of them. They argued that their advertising was essentially an “educational campaign.” And Peter, though he knew that the motives of the individual advertisers were not disinterested, and though he personally disliked the blatancy of most of their methods, conceded that the basic contention of the advertisers was ultimately right. Their advertising of production goods helped to reduce production costs; their advertising of consumption goods helped to increase demand and so reduce unit costs of production. Buyers were educated by the necessity of judging among rival claims and by actually comparing and trying out competing products. It was the comparative quality and price of the product itself that ultimately decided which product was bought and survived.

Peter rejected the contention that advertising was merely an economic “waste.” Like other costs of production, it had the purpose of increasing demand; and it accelerated the process of selecting the better production methods and the better consumption goods. In fact, Peter found it impossible to separate “selling costs” from other production costs. All production costs were in a sense “selling costs,” because a product had to be made attractive enough to buy. And for the same reason all necessary selling costs were necessary “production” costs.

And it was the process of continually improving production methods and consumption goods that to Peter was the greatest marvel of all. Life in Wonworld had been appallingly drab and stagnant; but Peter had never realized how drab and stagnant it was until the new free market system had wrought this change.

There was no line in which he did not find one miraculous improvement after another. In food, new vegetables and fruits were constantly being developed; new methods of selling and preparing them, and better ways of cooking them. Peter was particularly fascinated and impressed by the development and rapid progress of frozen foods, which enabled people to eat “fresh” fruits and vegetables all year round.

In clothing, where previously there had been cotton, wool, silk and linen, a marvelous array of new, cheaper, stronger and more beautiful textiles was constantly being developed. The chemists now seemed to be able to make textiles out of anything—wood or glass, milk or coal. The chemists seemed on the verge of discovering, in fact, that everything could be made out of anything.

Constant and bewildering improvements were being made in household conveniences, in fluorescent lighting, in radiant heating, in air-conditioning, in vacuum cleaners, in clothswashing machines, in dishwashing machines, in a thousand new structural and decorative materials. Great forward leaps were now taken in radio. There was talk of the development, in the laboratories, of the wireless transmission, not merely of music and voices, but of the living and moving image of objects and people.

Hundreds of new improvements, individually sometimes slight but cumulatively enormous, were being made in all sorts of transportation—in automobiles and railroads, in ships and airplanes. Inventors even talked of a new device to be called “jet-propulsion,” which would not only eliminate propellers but bring speeds rivaling that of sound itself.

In medicine, marvelous new anesthetics and new lifesaving drugs were constantly being discovered....

“In our new economic system, Adams,” said Peter, “we seem to have developed hundreds of thousands of individual centers of initiative which spontaneously co-operate with each other. We have made more material progress in the last four years, more industrial and scientific progress, than Wonworld made in a century.”

“That is entirely true,” agreed Adams. “But I should like to point out that Wonworld also has benefited by this progress. Bolshekov’s secret agents here see to it that his technicians get hold of all our scientific and trade publications, and of course they systematically steal our so-called military secrets. So in theoretical knowledge, if not in volume of production, my guess is that Wonworld has made almost as much progress as we have.”

“Whatever progress it has made is purely parasitic,” Peter said. “It would not exist if Bolshekov’s commissars were not constantly appropriating the successful improvements that our free enterprise system has developed.”

“You’re right, chief. But they get the benefit of them just the same. And after they have adopted or stolen an improvement from us, their propaganda bureau claims that the invention or discovery was really made by some Muscovite.”

But it was not merely in material progress that Freeworld achieved such amazing triumphs. No less striking were the new dignity and breadth that individual freedom brought about in the whole cultural and spiritual life of the Western Hemisphere.

The contrast, Peter found, was not quite so striking in certain realms—music, dancing, chess, mathematics. This, he concluded, was because these arts, sciences or pursuits “said nothing”—or at least what they said was so abstract and elusive that it was seldom regarded as being directly dangerous to Moscow’s ruling clique. There had therefore been a tendency, comparatively speaking, to let such pursuits alone. The brains and genius of Won-world, whenever they could, had always tried to get into these lines where they could function with comparative safety and freedom.

But in nearly all other realms the cultural and spiritual contrast was glaring. It showed itself in novels and plays, in criticism and poetry, in painting, sculpture and architecture, in political and economic thinking, in most sciences, in philosophy and religion.

And this, Peter decided, was because these pursuits no longer had to cater to the presumed tastes of a particular dictator or of a small group of commissars. The novels, plays and poetry written in Wonworld had been nauseating. They became still more nauseating under Bolshekov. For they were devoted either to the most savage ridicule and denunciation of whatever Bolshekov was not presumed to like, or of the most fawning and abject flattery of Bolshekov and of what he was supposed to have created. Sometimes the authors, playwrights and poets made an ideological mistake, or the party line reversed itself suddenly overnight, and then no matter with what servile and cringing apologies the writers were willing to repudiate or denounce what they had themselves written and to start saying the opposite, no matter how completely they were eager to abase themselves, they and their families were lucky to escape with their lives. Peter saw that this was inevitable under any system in which the livelihood of every author and artist depended on the “planners” at the center, on any one individual or compact ruling group.

The end of this tyranny had been like the lifting of a great weight.

Many of the new writers and artists of Freeworld, it is true, now catered to the presumed tastes of a mass public; and the bulk of what was produced was vulgar and cheap. But all this fell quickly into oblivion. It was not the bulk that counted. What counted, as Peter quickly saw, was that each writer and each artist was now liberated from abject subservience to the state, to the political ruling clique. He was now free to select his own public. He did not need to cater to a nebulous “mass demand.” He could, if he wished, write, build, think, compose or paint for a definite cultivated group, or for his fellow specialists, or for a few kindred spirits wherever they could be found. And plays did have a way of finding their own special audience, and periodicals and books of finding their own special readers.

In contrast with the drabness, monotony and dreariness of Wonworld, the cultural and spiritual life of Freeworld was full of infinite variety, flavor, and adventure.