"Steven Erikson," the pen name of Steve Lundin (b. 1959), a Canadian fantasy novelist best known for his massive Malazan series, was a Guest of Honor at the 2017 International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in March 2017. His Guest of Honor speech, "Standing Fast," appears in the
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, volume 29 no. 1 (2018), which I just read. Much of it concerns his own life, but there are some choice paragraphs about modern society that I think are worth sharing. So here are a few excerpts. The full talk is
online here.
If you want the rug pulled out from under your entire life, you
couldn't do much better than that.
I imagine many of you are feeling something similar, you who are
Americans, that is. A country founded on the hard-won principles of
democracy, just representation, and the freedom and opportunity to hold
your leaders accountable, and in a seeming flash it all ceases to
function the way it's supposed to. Elections are subverted, vast
segments of the population are cynically and systematically excluded
from the right to vote, and every institution devised by the
country's forefathers to prevent the rise of tyranny has abrogated
its responsibility to protect you and your country.
... for a nation to
self-destruct, it must first destroy its artists, its historians, its
scholars. It must reduce them to irrelevance. It must subvert language
and destroy faith. It must blind its painters, cut out the tongues of
its poets, and break the hands of its sculptors. The path from argument
to violence, I suggest, must be cleared of all obstacles, all
impediments, any and every appeal to reason, or humanity.
I don't know about all of you here today. I don't know if
you're feeling anywhere near as irrelevant as I do. Reasoned
thought, cogent argument, has given way to something else, something far
more visceral. Belief systems are at the heart of this feeding frenzy of
invective, and even recourse has lost its value, as each side talks past
the other, and all that held us together seems to be unraveling before
our eyes. Without the ability to communicate, what else is left to us?
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