ABSTRACT
Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, published in 1952, tells the story of Dr Paul Proteus and his engineered fall from grace that leads him to a secret resistance group, the Ghost Shirt Society, existing within the margins of a highly elite, technocratic and totalitarian society in the aftermath of a third world war. A totalitarian society organised not by terrorism
but by economic-technical coordination of vested interests. Its society is one that appears, as its main character Paul Proteus notes, as a ‘clean, straight rafter,’ that, once the surface is scraped away, is rotten to the core. Paul doesn’t just grapple with his technocratic totalitarian society in Player Piano, but also with the meaning of his life (as well as life in general), the paradox of progress, and the potential for human freedom at odds with the straightjackets of circumstance and history.
(Gannon, 2013) The following passage is an extract from the Ghost Shirt manifesto:I deny that there is any natural or divine law requiring that machines, efficiency, and organization should forever increase in scope, power, and complexity, in peace as in war. I see the growth of these now, rather, as the result of a dangerous lack of law.
I propose that men and women be returned to work as controllers of machines, and that the control of people by machines be curtailed. I propose, further, that the effects of changes in technology and organization on life patterns be taken into careful consideration, and that the changes be withheld or introduced on the basis of this consideration.
These are radical proposals, extremely difficult to put into effect. But the need for the being put into effect is far greater than all of the difficulties, and infinitely greater than the need for our national holy trinity, Efficiency, Economy, and Quality.
Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful. They must, therefore, be returned to participation in such enterprises.
158I hold, and the members of the Ghost Shirt Society hold: That there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, and Man is a creation of God. That there must be virtue in inefficiency, for Man is inefficient, and Man is a creation of God.
That there must be virtue in brilliance followed by stupidity, for Man is alternately brilliant and stupid, and Man is a creation of God.
You perhaps disagree with the antique and vain notion of Man’s being a creation of God.
But I find it a far more defensible belief than the one implicit in intemperate faith in lawless technological progress – namely, that man is on earth to create more durable and efficient images of himself, and hence, to eliminate any justification at all for his own continued existence.
(Vonnegut, 2006, pp. 301–303)