The Preacher Man by hammingbyrd7 is a story set in a far (more than 8000 years), post-apocalyptic, future about a new human society based on ‘Meritocracy’. It is a story of a great injustice inflicted on this future’s women and the unraveling of a cruel society at the hands of our protagonist in order to bring justice to all.
It’s an interesting read for sure. The author created an interesting world that was supposedly established by a founder greatly influenced by Islam. The society’s females were brought up to marriage age and prepared to live a life of slavery afterwards. On the night of their marriage, women’s brains were chemically fried to prohibit any long term memory retention, basically locking their personalities as ‘Eternal Virgins’, so that each day of their life was like their second day after marriage. This meshes well with Muslim heaven where each good man gets 72 virgins that stay virgins forever. They have sex with them and the next time it would be like it never happened. Personally, I wouldn’t want a virgin forever. It would be good if your partner knew what you liked and knew how to push the right buttons to bring you to a higher level of pleasure.
Few things in the story didn’t make much sense to me, like why would anybody want to have children in the described society? They can have as much sex without worrying about kids and after they have kids they don’t keep them, so there is no emotional incentive to conceive, especially in the society described by the author, where chances are that whatever offspring a man or woman has, they will never see them again and chances are that they won’t survive their school system. The author didn’t mention anything in the founder’s teachings that encouraged or mandated breeding.
The story is told in a series of snapshots of the protagonist’s life, nothing is mentioned about what goes on between those snapshots. No effort was made to depict the days to day way of life in such a future. The future described was a little cold for the lack of any kind of small details about daily life.
I recommend reading the story. It’s an enjoyable one, despite the author’s extreme affinity for numbers, dates and statistics :) .
I wonder whether the futuristic society created at the end of the story could survive long-term. Anecdotal evidence (from France for example) shows us that highly educated people that could control their breeding, and where women can decide whether they want to have children and how many, tend to have too few children to sustain their society.
I can see it all around me. Highly educated people tend to have too few children and the uneducated or ignorant tend to have a lot of them (in general, of course, like everything else, there are exceptions). This is the first time in history that humans face this issue. The more advanced we are, the less of us there are. It makes me wonder about our immediate future. A hundred years from now, who would be the dominant race on earth? will it be Muslims who’s religion and society mandate breeding like rabbits? Will the western societies survive such an onslaught? Will the future depicted in this story where Muslims prevailed come true just because of that reason? What do you think?
The author has writen a sequel to this story titled The Preacher’s Daughter.
I am suprised that you should espouse the view that the recent breeding record of highly educated people is a deviation from trend. It isn’t, as they have always spent more time learning and earning and less time breeding. If you are a supporter of social mobility (as all good folk should be) you should know that throughout history today’s elite has tended to become tomorrow’s refugee, even with a trust fund.
The rationale for children was to maintain the balance of the society. They felt that a certain number was perfect and to fall below this was bad so they had to have children to keep that range at all times.
You argue that anecdotal evidence suggests that the more educated have fewer children. Perhaps this is more due to the fact that those who end up having children cannot (as easily) continue their studies. As a result, the people continuing their studies are not going to be the ones having children at that age. I doubt the disparity between the educated and uneducated continues once you look beyond the age when people study and once you control for characteristics that are correlated with having children and studies (e.g. recent immigration, religion, etc.). Gary Becker, the Nobel-prize winning economist, has a paper about the incentives for having children.