"How can you doubt it? Now that the burden of racial responsibility has
been cut off from our backs, our longevity is trebled and more than
trebled. This may be assigned in part to our increased knowledge and to
the fact that we do no laborious or dangerous work. Laborious and
dangerous work is confined to the second class. With them, of course,
sex still exists. They are a lower order. They breed up children. When
the number of workers is deficient we keep those children. When the
number tends to be excessive they are destroyed. Have you never thought
into what a quandary racial responsibility led men and women in the dark
ages? No married man lived as an unmarried man, no married woman as an
unmarried woman. Life became a string of compromises and concessions.
There were complicated households with nurseries in them. It must be
clear to you that the man who works for six people must work just six
times as hard as the man who works for himself alone. Work is dangerous.
And if work is dangerous, worry is deadly. Worry is enormously increased
where there is any emotional attachment. Look how we have simplified
things. To one being one house. The emotions never paid for their keep,
and it is civilised to get rid of them. Tears are as little known among
the first-class beings of Thule as is the gross and unhygienic kiss. The
tortures of modesty do not affect us, for where there is no sex
distinction there is no modesty. We are emancipated. We are free. Love
implies death. The loveless live long. I may tell you that it is
whispered already that we are on the edge of discoveries which may make
it possible for us to live for ever."
"Well," I said, "I am not constituted as you are. You would hardly
expect me to like what you like."
"I do not expect any man from the old world to be civilised. It would
not be reasonable. But what objection can you possibly offer to the
state of things among the first-class beings here?"
"Well, to take the first point that occurs to me, it seems to me that
you must all be most horribly bored."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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