The Purpose is Everything

Jack Lawson of the Civil Defense Manual recently pointed out a post by Matt Bracken on one of his social media accounts linked at WRSA here. I point all of this out because I want folks to know what I’m about to go on about. I value both Jack and Matt for the hard work they’ve done and continue to do to try and save as much of the population as possible through whatever means they have. I believe a lot of us (us being people who would like to see the future be a better place, not considerably and demonstrably worse) have done what we could with what we have or could scrape together as a group. I know this sounds like there’s a “but” coming, but there isn’t.

In Matt’s comment he talks about not feeling like there’s much purpose in writing about the dystopian future, since it’s here, now, in front of our eyes. As a writer myself and someone who considers himself ready and willing to jump into anything that makes some effort to rectify the mess, however seemingly hopeless it might be, like the Convoy I covered with help from subscribers to this page, I think he’s right…for him.

Matt has always expressed his desire to write as having something to do with waking people up to the dangers presenting themselves through societal shifts and nebulous “norms” as they appear and disappear. Okay, not in so many words, but you get the gist. If that was his only purpose in writing, then I agree with him, but I think he offers a more substantial role in the world of literature than just that. Matt’s clearly on the leading edge of what the future will call the “dystopian period” in American literature, where the future was in the sightline of many writers and they used this method of writing to alert their neighbors that big changes were coming, if they didn’t act. Well, they didn’t, or not well enough to stop any of it, but that’s not on the writer.

The question is, what role does literature play in the future? For me, literature allows a common reference point for future discussions. Think of how many times George Orwell’s “1984” has been referenced, or Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” or Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.” Among the patriots, it’s hard to have a conversation about substantive matters where “Enemies Foreign and Domestic,” “The Civil Defense Manual,” John Ross’ “Unintended Consequences” or Kurt Schlicter’s “Indian Country” aren’t mentioned or, at least, recalled mentally, during the conversation.

We all have our reasons to write, Fran Porretto at Liberty’s Torch, like myself, have our fiction as well as our blogs. They often seem disconnected or separate from each other, his more so than mine, I think.

For me, preserving history as accurately as I can deduce it from studying the period and the attitudes of the time, reading several different authors and books to get a general sense is important. “Shadow Soldier” looked at a young man, like many, who found themselves in the Frontier West after the Civil War. They were broke, considered traitors and tried to figure out how they were going to live the rest of their lives. Where would I have been in my research if there had been no one who recognized their place in society, their particular journey through tumultuous times as important enough to write about? I gleaned a lot of valuable information from personal journals of people traveling into the West that had subsequently been published by some university press or historical society.

The world began to change for me in the late 70s when technology and the urban push encroached on my agricultural world, turning it into a suburban one. I wrote “Rebel” about that experience, that and the fact that the educational system was whacked, even then. Sound familiar to today? That’s my point.

A reader draws things from what they read, makes comparisons to the lives related in the books to their own, sometimes figure out problems when doing so. I understand bullets and guns and heavy metal solutions to soft target problems, but somewhere deep inside, that recognition of value came from reading. If the world can be changed to something horrific by Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” can it not also be saved by something like “Atlas Shrugged” or “Gulag Archipelago?”

I think that was Matt’s point and a feeling I often get, that no matter what we’ve written in blogs or books over the past decade or two, the future maintained it’s eventual path as if we’d done nothing. Another question is: how many people changed their lives for the better, had a positive impact on their community for having read and found homes in the thoughts and words of people like Matt?

The criticism often is that writing these books is all for cash, some sort of grift, but if money were the purpose and aim of writing, no one could make a more foolish investment. Would one like to see their hard labor (it’s much harder to write a book than people think) return a little of the time-investment? Sure. But any writer will tell you that if there isn’t some inner driving force, some valuable contribution they believe they will make or compelling tale they might relate, it just isn’t worth it. Matt’s inspiration was clearly warning of the coming present and now it might be hard to find the same driving force within himself. That was the sentiment I got when reading the post.