Conservative Reading: Nine-Tenths

Nine-Tenths is a dystopian tale in sci-fi wrapping paper. Ostensibly a time-travel story, only the very beginning and end of the book actually deal much with science fiction. The meat of the book is what happens in an alternate time-line where the United States has been transformed into a totalitarian state. Like the great dystopian works of1984 and Brave New World, Nine-Tenths draws a frightening picture of a society that is all too plausible.

I found two characteristics of the alternate United States created by author Meira Pentermann to be particularly noteworthy. We get a good look at how important it is for any would be tyrant to control both health care and education.

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In the story, government lackeys are brought in to administer health care, while real, qualified doctors are marginalized.  This provides a crucial avenue through which the dictator is able to both keep the population in perpetual fear, as well as dependent upon the state.

We also see how education is used to drive a wedge between generations, and co-opt children for the purposes of the dictatorship. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used brainwashed youth in this fashion to report on fellow citizens and keep tabs on their parents. The centralized control of education is an integral part of achieving this ambition. The need toundermine the family unit and substitute for it reliance on the state is also a real-world characteristic of dictatorships accurately captured in the novel. There are many other details in the book which suggest the author has studied the history of dictatorships.

As I’m sure you were able to gather from the items I mentioned above, the actual United States is busy putting together many of the necessary pieces for a dictatorship. With the right (or wrong) combination of personality, circumstances and timing, the world Pentermann paints in Nine-Tenths could become one day become our reality, and this book serves as a much needed reminder of that fact.

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I created the Conservative Reading series to highlight and promote writers telling good stories with conservative views or overtones. The left has long understood that to influence popular culture through entertainment media, you have to tell a good story first and foremost. The right, it seems to me, is only just coming to truly understand this. To help spread the ideas of liberty, I’m sharing through the Conservative Reading series any good stories I have found that also contain right-leaning views, instead of the usual leftism that dominates popular culture.