"Robert A. Heinlein - Methuselahs Children" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

have their weaknesses but most of them are decent enough if you give them
half a chance. I cannot believe that they would hate me and destroy me
simply because I have lived a long time. What have you to go on? You admit
one mistake-why not two?“
Schultz looked at her soberly and smoothed his kilt. „You’re right, Eve. I
could easily be wrong again. That’s the trouble with psychology; it is a
subject so terribly complex, so many unknowns, such involved relationships,
that our best efforts sometimes look silly in the bleak light of later facts.“ He
stood up again, faced the others, and again spoke with flat authority. „But I
am not making a long-range prediction this time; I am talking about facts, no
guesses, not wishful thinking-and with those facts a prediction so short-range
that it is like predicting that an egg will break when you see it already on its
way to the floor. But Eve is right . . . as far as she went. Individuals are kind
and decent . . . as individuals and to other individuals. Eve is in no danger
from her neighbors and friends, and I am in no danger from mine. But she is
in danger from my neighbors and friends -and I from hers. Mass psychology
is not simply a summation of individual psychologies; that
is a prime theorem of social psychodynamics -not just my opinion; no
exception has ever been found to this theorem. It is the social mass-action
rule, the mob-hysteria law, known and used by military, political, and religious
leaders, by advertising men and prophets and propagandists, by rabble
rousers and actors and gang leaders, for generations before it was
formulated in mathematical symbols. It works. It is working now.
„My colleagues and I began to suspect that a mob-hysteria trend was
building up against us several years ago. We did not bring our suspicions to
the council for action because we could not prove anything. What we
observed then could have been simply the mutterings of the crackpot
minority present in even the healthiest society. The trend was at first so minor
that we could not be sure it existed, for all social trends are intermixed with
other social trends, snarled together like a plate of spaghetti-worse than that,
for it takes an abstract topological space of many dimensions (ten or twelve
are not uncommon and hardly adequate) to describe mathematically the
interplay of social forces. I cannot overemphasize the complexity of the
problem.
„So we waited and worried and tried statistical sampling, setting up our
statistical universes with great care.
„By the time we were sure, it was almost too late. Socio-psychological trends
grow or die by a ‚yeast growth’ law, a complex power law. We continued to
hope that other favorable factors would reverse the trend-Nelson’s work in
symbiotics, our own contributions to geriatrics, the great public interest in the
opening of the Jovian satellites to immigration. Any major break-through
offering longer life, and greater hope to the short-lived could end the
smouldering resentment against us.
„Instead the smouldering has burst into flame, into an uncontrolled forest fire.
As nearly as we can measure it, the rate has doubled in the past thirty-seven
days and the rate itself is accelerated. I can’t guess how far or how fast it will
go-and that’s why we asked for this emergency session. Because we can
expect trouble at any moment.“ He sat down hard, looking tired.
Eve did not argue with him again and no one else argued with him at all; not
only was Ralph Schultz considered expert in his own field but also every one