{"id":726,"date":"2019-08-20T07:06:37","date_gmt":"2019-08-20T12:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lfs.org\/blog\/?p=726"},"modified":"2025-06-19T21:45:03","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T02:45:03","slug":"travis-corcoran-accepts-prometheus-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/travis-corcoran-accepts-prometheus-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Travis Corcoran accepts 2019 Prometheus Award for Causes of Separation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Travis Corcoran holds up\u00a0 his Prometheus Award.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is the acceptance speech by Travis Corcoran for 2019 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for Causes of Separation.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0(Corcoran could not attend the Dublin Worldcon but wrote this acceptance speech to be read there at the ceremony.)<\/em><\/p>\n

I would like to thank the LFS for this year’s award, but more\u00a0generally, I’d like to thank them for existence of the Prometheus\u00a0award, all forty years of it. It’s good that our subculture has a\u00a0long-lived award to recognize excellent science fiction, especially\u00a0pro-liberty science fiction.<\/p>\n

But the Prometheus award is not merely recognition, it’s an incentive!<\/p>\n

In fact, I might not have written my novels without the Prometheus to\u00a0aim for. But the Prometheus is not a financial incentive. The\u00a0one-ounce gold coin on the plaque is nice, but neither I nor any of\u00a0the other winners over 40 years would ever trade or sell it, and thus\u00a0– ironically – it has no financial value.
\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And yet the award – a recognition by a community – is a huge incentive. There’s an interesting argument here about anti-libertarian tropes like the not-so-veiled anti-semitic and anti-capitalist propaganda of socialist Star Trek’s Ferengi, the bourgeois virtues, and the non-market human flourishing that only\u00a0human liberty unleashes, but that’s a rant for some other day.<\/p>\n

Thomas Aquinas said “Homo unius libri timeo” – “beware the man of one\u00a0book.” The meaning has shifted – almost reversed – from “beware the\u00a0man who has studied one topic intensely” to “beware the man who has\u00a0only one simple view of a thing.” I concur with this advice (in both\u00a0forms!).<\/p>\n

Libertarianism is absolutely correct in its magisteria (the\u00a0morality of freedom vs coercion), but we need other theories to\u00a0augment it when we move our sights from individual liberty and\u00a0financial incentives to other topics, like culture formation – and\u00a0culture subversion.<\/p>\n

In my quest to understand the constructed social world, I’ve stuck\u00a0my toe in libertarianism for a theory of autonomy, in neo-reaction for a\u00a0theory of organizational incentives, in Judeo-Christian theology and\u00a0classical history for theories of deontology and virtue ethics, in\u00a0biology for a theory of energy flows, growth, and parasitism.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The book The Runaway Brain: The Evolution Of Human Uniqueness <\/em>by\u00a0Christopher Wills made the argument that at a certain point in human\u00a0evolution we’d de facto conquered the physical world around us, and\u00a0the majority of evolutionary pressure over the last 100,000 years has\u00a0been sexual or social selection.<\/p>\n

An individual’s chance of passing\u00a0along its genes depended less on the size of its ability to manipulate\u00a0the physical environment through fangs and fur, and more on its\u00a0ability to manipulate the physical environment through alliances,\u00a0treachery, gossip, and stories. The game of “Risk” was put on the\u00a0shelf and replaced with “Diplomacy”.<\/p>\n

Every ideology and subculture likes to tell stories about how it will\u00a0naturally and obviously win. Nineteenth century Protestant missionaries\u00a0knew that European Protestantism was the way of the future. 20th\u00a0century Marxists knew that Marxism was. In the early 21st century\u00a0Wired magazine told us that “netizens” would use technology to create\u00a0a brave new world. The fact that every one of them has been wrong so\u00a0far should inform our Bayesian priors.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Perhaps cryptography, bitcoin, and the internet aren’t going to create a libertarian future. Perhaps the future looks a lot more like Orwell’s boot stomping on a face, forever.<\/p>\n

Why might this be, and – if it does – how might we respond to it?<\/p>\n

Last year I spoke about the essay “Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in\u00a0subculture evolution” by David Chapman, which argues that new\u00a0subcultures are pioneered by geeks, appreciated by members of the\u00a0public, and taken over by sociopaths. His thesis is a particular\u00a0example of a more general case.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Jerry Pournelle in 2005 (Creative Commons license)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There’s also Pournelle’s – yes, that Pournelle – iron law of bureaucracy” which states “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”<\/p>\n

Robert Conquest’s third law expresses something similar: “Any\u00a0organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes\u00a0left-wing.”<\/p>\n

Chapman’s essay and Pournelle’s and Conquest’s laws are three\u00a0observations of a single underlying phenomena: the collectivists\u00a0always worm their way in and take over. We know THAT this happens,\u00a0but WHY does it happen? How can we model it and understand it?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Living on a farm, my thinking turns to biology and ecosystems – which\u00a0is really just another way of saying economics. Earth’s ecosystem is\u00a0driven by sunlight – 1,367 watts per square meter. Everything that is\u00a0alive – and everything that has ever been alive – lives off of the\u00a0differential between that insolation and the dark of space.<\/p>\n

An organism can capture the sunlight directly (like clover does), or\u00a0it can eat something that captures the sunlight (like sheep do), or it\u00a0can eat something that eats something that captures the sunlight (like\u00a0humans, wolves, and parasites like liver fluke do).<\/p>\n

It’s currently believed that predation evolved not long after\u00a0unicellular life did. Evolution may be a blind watchmaker, but it\u00a0operates as a massive parallel computation. Of course evolution\u00a0stumbled into the clever hack of gaining energy from others who had\u00a0done the hard work of harvesting it from the sun.<\/p>\n

My theory, which unites Chapman’s “Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths”,\u00a0Pournelle’s Iron Law, and Conquest’s Third Law is this: organisms,\u00a0whether they’re unicellular, multicellular, or purely information,\u00a0like Dawkin’s memes, egregores, and ideologies, mutate, evolve, and\u00a0are selected for. Those that are best at surviving and reproducing\u00a0soon dominate the population…and one of the best ways to survive is\u00a0secure energy resources by hunting, killing, and eating (or, more\u00a0gently, parasitizing) organisms that do the hard work of harvesting\u00a0energy and building structures.<\/p>\n

David Hines has a great essay at the status451.com<\/a> blog titled “Days\u00a0of Rage” where he discusses the surge in left-wing organizing and\u00a0terrorism in the US in the 1970s. One thing that Hines points out\u00a0again and again is that collectivists plan, they train, and they\u00a0invade. I note that their organizations also exchange members and\u00a0ideas (mate) and fission (reproduce). We are looking not just at a\u00a0parasite, but at a class of parasite, forged and refined in the\u00a0Darwinian furnace.<\/p>\n

Evolution is a harsh mistress.<\/p>\n

I touched on the topic of collectivist entryism last year when I spoke\u00a0of the Gramscian long march through the institutions, but what I want\u00a0to make clear is that there is not a single villain. We cannot cut\u00a0the head off the beast, because it is the gradient of the universe\u00a0that we’re fighting. Or, rather, we can cut the head off the beast,\u00a0but the beast is a hydra.<\/p>\n

In the Second Punic War, the Roman general Fabius Maximus avoided\u00a0direct confrontation with the Carthaginians, preferring to harass them,\u00a0wear them out, and sap their will, confident that victory would\u00a0eventually be his. It is after this general that the British\u00a0socialists named their “Fabian society” in 1884.<\/p>\n

As “Saint Rev” has said on twitter, there is an entire class that\u00a0lives by killing organizations and cultures and then wearing the\u00a0corpse as a skin suit.<\/p>\n

This is not a new phenomena. The Fabians have been doing it for well\u00a0over a century.<\/p>\n

Predation and parasitism are selected for in the biosphere because\u00a0they are efficient. They’re selected for in the realm of human\u00a0culture for the same reason. It’s easier to harvest energy from a\u00a0parasitized host species than it is to grow leaves, and it’s easier to\u00a0take over a subculture than it is to create one.<\/p>\n

Thus science fiction will always suffer wave after wave of entryists, trying to claim the subculture for themselves. And, like Orwell’s Big Brother, they will\u00a0rewrite history to declare that they invented it. “Let me join your\u00a0club. You have to change now that I’m here. You have to leave now. We\u00a0all agree that I made this, decades ago.”<\/p>\n

We see that all entrusts\u00a0do this (“The United States was always about social justice ; the\u00a0Jewish faith was always about social justice ; this TV station and car\u00a0line and toothpaste were always about social justice”) and we conclude\u00a0that they do because it is the optimal strategy, tested and chosen by\u00a0evolution.<\/p>\n

So, is that it? Are we doomed to lose all battles, to be preyed upon\u00a0and parasitized?<\/p>\n

In the biosphere, only a minority of organisms are predators or\u00a0parasites. How could it be otherwise? Someone still needs to do the\u00a0hard work of capturing solar energy and building biological matter.\u00a0So too in the world of human culture. Tax-thieving governments and\u00a0culture-thieving brigands can’t kill the goose that lays the golden\u00a0egg. The Lotka-Volterra equations, first developed in 1910 to\u00a0describe chemical reactions, but echoing Pierre-Fran\u00e7ois Verhulst’s\u00a0logistic equation from almost a century earlier quantified the\u00a0mechanism.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And, since biology is economics is sociology, I note that Mancur Lloyd\u00a0Olson Jr.’s theory of roving bandits, which are willing to loot\u00a0everything from a village, and stationary bandits, who learn to\u00a0restrain themselves so as to keep the village alive, and capable of\u00a0being pillaged (or “taxed”) again reaches the same conclusion:\u00a0predators can never outpopulate the prey … at least not for long.<\/p>\n

Based on Lotka, Volterra, and Olson, then, I suggest that the collectivists’ social entryism will never be total. Negative feedback loops will ensure that. When will the entryist wave peak? Perhaps it already has. The last decade saw the cultures of video games and comics under attack from entryists, but perhaps the high water mark has already been reached, as we’ve seen several horrific market failure, such as the female Ghostbusters<\/em> fiasco, Mass Effect:<\/em>\u00a0Andromeda,<\/em> or that time when Zoe Quinn of comicsgate \/ Five Guys<\/em> fame\u00a0was given a DC Comics title. As the Twitter meme says “get woke, go\u00a0broke”.<\/p>\n

But on the other hand, perhaps not. Strauss\u2013Howe generations theory,\u00a0which I tentatively give the nod to, suggests that we’re going to be\u00a0deep in the suck for quite a while yet.<\/p>\n

I hear that the next 007 is going to be female and Blade is going to\u00a0be rebooted as a Muslim. Some media executives are always trying to\u00a0ice-skate up hill.<\/p>\n

So perhaps we’re not out of the woods. Perhaps more cultural warfare,\u00a0more predation, more entryism is our future, where “our” means both\u00a0the west as a free Enlightenment society, and also science fiction\u00a0lovers as a subculture: repeated waves of invasion, ongoing predation\u00a0and constant parasitism, but … survival. Of a sort.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What strategies can we use to improve our odds, to make life somewhat\u00a0more tolerable in a world where Darwinianism means that threats are\u00a0ever present?<\/p>\n

Look to biology.<\/p>\n

We can evolve physical defenses, we can evolve camouflage, or we can\u00a0adapt to new environments that are less conducive to predators.<\/p>\n

What do these mean in social terms?<\/p>\n

Physical defenses means organizations building mechanisms to keep\u00a0entryists out – a topic on which I am not an expert…and Pournelle’s\u00a0Law and Conquest’s Third Law suggest that perhaps no one is.<\/p>\n

The social equivalent of camouflage is a mixture of esotericism (in\u00a0dangerous times people speak in code) and foot-dragging Vichy\u00a0coexistence. Scott Aaronson and Slate Star Codex wrote essays on\u00a0“Kolmogorov complicity” (a good pun on Kolmogorov complexity), and I\u00a0urge you to read them.<\/p>\n

My favorite, is the third option: moving to where the predators\u00a0aren’t. Which – surprise – boils down to my old favorite, exit.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jame C Scott talks about exit extensively in his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia<\/em> and in his later book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States<\/em>. He makes the core point that when you see a populace that does not have certain social technologies, that does not mean – contra the default narrative – that they never evolved them. Sometimes populations intentionally abandon technologies because those techniques make them legibile to control and subversion by the overculture.<\/p>\n

If you want to avoid computer viruses, rip the computers out of your Battlestar. If you want to avoid land taxes, burn down the land registry, or become nomadic. If you want to avoid having your subculture taken over by collectivists … what, exactly?<\/p>\n

In 2011 I started writing a story about anarchocapitalism, economics,\u00a0lunar colonization, social media, genetically modified dogs, strong AI\u00a0really big guns, but the core question on my mind was “how do humans\u00a0achieve freedom?” The result was two novels: The Powers of the Earth,<\/em><\/a>\u00a0which won the Prometheus Award in 2018, and Causes of Separation,\u00a0<\/em>which won the Prometheus Award this year.<\/p>\n

Now, as I’m writing the final two novels in the Aristillus series –\u00a0Right and Duty<\/em> and Absolute Tyranny<\/em> – the question on my mind is a\u00a0different one, the one above: how does an organism protect itself from\u00a0parasites? How does a culture avoid being taken over by entryists?<\/p>\n

My answers, if any, will be delivered in a few years.<\/p>\n

…but I have some intuitions now.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I’m tempted to quote from the last chapter of Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky,<\/em> about moving outward, ever outward, but there’ve been too many farm and biology references in this speech, so let me quote instead from the end of Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s short story “Red Star, Winter Orbit”, where a plucky band escapes the gravity well.:<\/p>\n

“They said we’d never make it living in the balloons, but we were\u00a0the only ones who could make them work. It was our one chance to\u00a0get out here on our own. Who’d want to live out here for the sake\u00a0of some government, some army brass, a bunch of pen pushers? You\u00a0have to want a frontier – want it in your bones, right? We\u00a0grabbed those power cables and just pulled ourselves straight\u00a0up. And when you get to the top, well, man, you either make that\u00a0big jump or else you rot there. And you don’t look back, no sir!\u00a0We’ve made that jump, and we’re here to stay!”<\/p>\n

And thus, my thesis: perhaps freedom exists only on the frontier. We\u00a0need to keep pushing on. We need to make that big jump, and not look\u00a0back.<\/p>\n

And in conclusion: Boston Delenda Est.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS<\/b><\/p>\n

*\u00a0Join us!<\/b> To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, \u00a0join<\/a> the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans.<\/p>\n

Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other\u2019s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.<\/p>\n

* Prometheus winners:\u00a0<\/b>For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees \u2013 including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the enhanced \u00a0Prometheus Awards page<\/a>\u00a0on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards\u2019 distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog\u2019s\u00a0Video page.<\/a><\/p>\n

* Read \u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/a> an essay in the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/i>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.<\/p>\n

* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society\u2019s Facebook page<\/a> for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Travis Corcoran holds up\u00a0 his Prometheus Award.\u00a0 Here is the acceptance speech by Travis Corcoran for 2019 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for Causes of Separation.\u00a0\u00a0(Corcoran could not attend the Dublin Worldcon but wrote this acceptance speech to be read there at the ceremony.) I would like to thank the LFS for this year’s award, … Continue reading Travis Corcoran accepts 2019 Prometheus Award for Causes of Separation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32,31,9,2605,2664],"tags":[148,145,136,142,122,138,140,144,17,146,143,141,147,139,135,137,42],"class_list":["post-726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-author-updates","category-awards-news","category-essay","category-sequels","category-travis-corcoran","tag-absolute-tyranny","tag-against-the-grain","tag-aristillus-series","tag-big-brother","tag-causes-of-separation","tag-christopher-wills","tag-david-hines","tag-james-c-scott","tag-jerry-pournelle","tag-lunar-colonization","tag-mancur-olson","tag-orwell","tag-right-and-duty","tag-robert-conquest","tag-the-powers-of-the-earth","tag-thomas-aquinas","tag-travis-corcoran"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-bI","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9441,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions\/9441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}