024 Hard to Be a God
3.5%
After last post’s mention of ‘Hard to Be a God’ I thought I would revisit the story and consider it a bit more.
The book was first published in Russian in 1964, then English in 1973. There are two film versions: one from 1989, which I haven’t seen, and another from 2013 which I have seen and what I refer to in this post. The book is generally considered to be a sci-fi masterpiece, and it’s a rollicking read. The 2013 film is a 3 hour, black and white film that can feel claustrophobic and unrelenting in its filth and suffering. Like life itself, the film leaves you to impose a firm narrative structure on it because while there are threads of it present in the film, it’s hard to see it through the mud. The camera is a point of view, and there is wall-breaking. It is also generally considered to be a cinematic masterpiece.
To recap:
‘Hard to Be a God’ is set in Arkanar where they have not experienced a Renaissance. They are stuck in their middle-ages. Anton has been living on Arkanar as an undercover operative from future Earth for 20 years, tasked with observing the society and protecting the intellectuals who are constantly tortured and executed by the inhabitants of the planet, its police-state government and an influential militant religious sect. Anton uses the alias ‘Don Rumata’ while on Arkanar and is otherwise not supposed to interfere with how the society develops (or doesn’t), nor is he permitted to kill anyone. To cope with his despair of this situation he drinks heavily and indulges in debauchery when he can.1
The more I think about it, the more relevant the themes of the story are to today.
This post will contain spoilers for the book and film ‘Hard to Be a God’.
This post will contain: Violence & Gore, Frightening & Intense Scenes.
The Non-Interventionalist Approach
The title of the work comes from a thought Don Rumata has as he tries to explain that he is not in fact a God. Much of his story is about how he deals or doesn’t deal with not being able to intervene in the hellscape all around him. He is from the future Earth, which has evolved beyond their Renaissance. There’s advanced technology there, which Don Rumata knows about and could access if he disobeyed the orders he’s been given.
As he watches the depravity of the rulers of Arkanar, his rage and despair swells. It makes him panicky and angry. I think a lot of us have felt that rage, despair, panic and anger over the last decade or so. He is torn because he knows that there is an alternative to what is happening around him, but there are rules to his mission that he must abide by. Right?
I wonder if the Heads of State watched the live streaming of children being hunted for sport like we did and felt the same rage, despair, panic and anger. Thanks to social media it is the first time a lot of people have had direct, immediate access to witness what genocide, colonisation, and war actually looks like. I wonder if Keir (International Human Rights Lawyer) Starmer felt any rage, despair, panic or anger, as he averted his eyes from the horrific first hand accounts we all witnessed. I wonder if the word ‘genocide’ is on the back of his tongue, choking him as he desperately holds it back from escaping his mouth.
When I see the Heads of State look away from corporations polluting our planet, knowing very easily that they could do something about it, but also knowing they put their power at risk if they challenge the ultra-wealthy, do they feel the same despair? Maybe not. Maybe they’re immune to it now. Maybe it’s all part of the job now. Maybe they see themselves as being in an impossible position. “What could I, as the Prime Minster of one of the largest economies in the world, the head of state of a G7 and G20 nation, member of NATO and nuclear power, possibly do to help end the pointless suffering of millions of people in the UK and abroad?” 🤷🏼
Anti-intellectualism
The authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, were very much writing about Stalin’s purges and the Great Terror when many people, including scientists, writers, and academics were seen as a threat to the regime and so were imprisoned, executed, or sent to gulags. Even in the early 20th century, anti-intellectualism was nothing new, and I believe (perhaps even more so now) that anti-intellectualism takes on many forms.
Kill the Scholars
There are the blatant “kill the scholars, artists, and educators” style of attacks, very much like Stalin and Hitler. It is the kind of mass state violence that gets used as propaganda to keep populations in fear and uneducated. Physical violence from the state against dissenting citizens didn’t stop after World War II of course; the USA is particularly fond of assassinating influential individuals who go against the state ideology, but they’re not the only ones, Russia is still doing it too.
This kind of anti-intellectualism is shown in ‘Hard to Be a God’. Arkanar is lead by Don Reba, on behalf of a ruling elite, who kills scholars, burns books, and ensures that any kind of intellectual class is wiped out because free thinking is “counter-revolutionary” and challenging the regime is a crime. Of course, in real life not all assassinations are physical; sometimes it’s an assassination of character that gets people who go against state/corporate sanctioned ideology out of the way.
For a real-time example of anti-intellectualism, just listen to Jim Jordan, go on record saying that experts are not important, fact checking is not important. But notice that expertise can be acknowledged and respected when it agrees with his world view. The Supreme Court can be experts and ‘fact check’. The guy who owns the biggest tech company in the world can be an expert and ‘fact check’, but disagree with Jordan’s world view that Russia didn’t invade Ukraine, and your expertise is not required.
The Slow Boil
There’s another kind of anti-intellectualism that isn’t quite as messy as smear campaigns or murder, it involves education policy. Anti-intellectualism as education policy, if you like. This isn’t just the burning and banning of books, the deletion of websites; no, this is the slow boil style of attack where the state not only gradually [UK] or suddenly [US] stops funding public education, but deliberately dilutes it until 16-21% of adults are functionally illiterate23 , huge swathes of the population have little to no critical thinking skills, and those who do are exhausted from having to second guess everything they see.
This is the kind of anti-intellectualism that seeps in beneath our feet and gradually rises until we are slowly boiling in it. It’s the anti-intellectualism that tells us that boys should do science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) and girls should do arts and humanities (or just stay home and have babies). Actually, no, everyone should do STEM because arts and humanities subjects require too much independent thinking. We don’t want ballet dancers, we want cybersecurity specialists. As though they can’t imagine a world with both.
And because of their own education, they can’t (or don’t want to) understand that art is applied STEM. Music is a form of maths, mixed with technology. Sculpture is a form of engineering. Colour theory is science. Dance is…what? Kinesiology? Physics? My point is you can’t do art without at least an implicit understanding of STEM. It’s the same stuff, expressed in very different ways.
And perhaps that’s exactly why the state likes to direct the education curriculum away from a variety of ways to express ideas. Ideas can be dangerous. And if “dangerous ideas” can be expressed in ways that aren’t gate kept and jargon laden, if “dangerous ideas” are easily understandable, then that can make it difficult for states to control the narrative.4
One also has to consider that it’s not just education policy that makes anti-intellectualism a feature not a bug, it’s the pressures of modern life. Parents don’t have time to read to their kids at home, then kids get left behind in school, and then they might be diverted into a prison or military industrial complex, and fewer and fewer people can afford to go to tertiary education anyway. Not that it matters because once you get to tertiary education, where there’s much more room to think independently, you’ll probably end up in the ‘Kill the Scholars’ group.
We might be able to say that millennials, some younger GenXers, and older GenZers feel it is ‘Hard to Be a God’ because they have seen their parents (or grandparents, older siblings) able to achieve financial security, job security, disposable income, a well functioning NHS, retirement, freedom of movement throughout Europe. It was all right there. But it’s not for them, nor for their kids (if they can even afford to have them). They know what’s possible, and they watched it being dismantled right in front of them. This is part of Don Rumata’s despair that sends him to the brink of sanity, he knows of a life beyond the Dark Ages, and there’s definitely no public health service in Arkanar to help him with his mental health.
Everyday Anti-Intellectualism
Then there is the kind of anti-intellectualism that’s delivered by blunt instruments on TV and social media. Media personalities, influencers, propagandists, whatever you want to call them, dish out a combination of ‘don’t you worry your pretty little head about this’, ‘it’s not that deep, dude’, ‘hey look over here at this horrible thing that could happen to you too’, and ‘hey look over here at this tiny group of people who have no real power and just want to live their life, you should hate them’ 24 hours a day.
Most recently one of the most amusing examples of anti-intellectualism was the countless attempts to convince people that Kendrick Lamar’s performance at the Super Bowl was terrible, or (worse) that it was just about dissing Drake.
The most ridiculous of these influencers I saw is a black, gay, “Republican” man making TikTok after TikTok trying to convince people that Kendrick Lamar’s performance at the Super Bowl was awful. The leopards will surely eat his face one day, but in the meantime he is committing to his bit that the performance was terrible because it wasn’t entertaining.
He wanted to be entertained, so that he (and the 84 million other people who watched it on YouTube) didn’t have to think.
That’s fine. He could’ve turned it off. He could’ve gone and made a snack while it was on. He could have reasoned that it simply wasn’t for him. It is probably impossible to please all of the 127.7 million US viewers of the Super Bowl, so he wouldn’t have been alone.
But he didn’t want to have to think. He didn’t want to have to think about the process of creating a show like that, for a client such as the National Football League. Lamar didn’t simply agree to perform, put the performance together in a soundstage somewhere, then surprise every decision-maker up to the CEO of the NFL on game day. This was a pre-approved performance. Which is surprising given that the same organisation effectively ended a starting quarterback’s career for kneeling during the national anthem not so long ago.
Our influencer didn’t want to have to think about why Samuel L. Jackson played the character called ‘Uncle Sam’ or about everything he actually said during the performance, or why the stage was laid out like a games controller, or what the messages in lights from within the crowd said, or why all of the black and brown dancers dressed in red, white, and blue, or what the reference to Gil Scott-Heron meant, what the visual imagery of men hanging out on a street corner singing a cappella calls to, what forty acres and a mule refers to, why Serena was c-walking, or why “Turn the TV Off” was the last song.
He didn’t really have to think about that. He could have just thought about Kendrick Lamar’s beats and lyrics.
Or maybe not.
Of course making sure your attention is directed towards entertainment is built into the fabric of our lives, it is literally in the palm of our hands. I believe it is the foundational method of how technocrats have gained significant political power. Nir Eyal wrote what is considered to be the handbook on how to make your app “habit forming”. It is a feature, not a bug.
In Arkanar there is some music, Don Rumata even tries to teach some of the locals various tunes. There is alcohol, because even in the real world that’s been around since ~7000 BCE. But most people in that world are either slaves, part of the religious cult that holds some power in the region, or part of the Greys who are the militant police force. (Read that last sentence again.) No one there even has time for entertainment beyond watching the smartarses and “whores” be killed in the public square, drinking, and fucking.
Most of the curiosity that exists in Arkanar is with regards to who is and who isn’t an intellectual, whether Don Rumata is or isn’t the son of a God, how they are going to continue to exist, and whether a dead body has something on it that is valuable. It’s ideal for the rulers that the population can’t even begin to imagine something different.
It’s just like we talked about last time: lack of imagination. Entertainment will distract us, for a while. While we’re all trying to guess who is the tea pot in The Masked Singer, there’s raw sewage in the waterways, invasions of sovereign states, the erasure of histories (and present day lives), and endless wars for non-renewable resources.
As the utterly brilliant comedian, Josh Johnson says:
“Art can save you, but entertainment will never be your salvation. If you really want to see a different country, a different neighbourhood, you're probably going to have to turn the TV off."
The Limits of Individual Heroism
Eventually Don Rumata’s wretchedness turns lethal; he sets out to kill Don Reba. It is against his orders to kill while observing this planet, and he even begs a God he isn’t sure exists to stop his murderous intent. In the book he does realise before the act that killing Don Reba will not solve all the problems of this world. He would have to kill many, many more of them and he knows it. If one tyrannical leader was to be taken out, they would simply be replaced by another one. Someone like a vice-president or a tech-robber-baron.
While ‘Hard to Be a God’ conveys a message that there are limits to individual heroism, it doesn’t explore the possibility of collective heroism. The uneducated, fearful, superstitious population is not willing to challenge the ruling class in Arkanar; in fact they often work with them, dobbing in their neighbours or at least planting the seeds of suspicion to the religious cult or military police.
In 2011 Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan had identified that it takes approximately 3.5% of the population to bring about change. But by 2020, they had noticed that the non-violent movements in the 2010s were less effective, most likely due to “savvier state responses” as well as changes to the ways we resist the state.5
It’s now 2025 and one thing we must adapt to in the UK and the US is the limitations placed upon peaceful protests. In the UK getting out into the streets, or even protesting alone in public, can you get you arrested under the Public Order Act 2023 if it is deemed a ‘serious disruption’. In 2025, as Chenoweth points out, organising online certainly means easier communication, but it also means easier surveillance.
One of the most effective forms of non-violent protests, that poses absolutely no risk of arrest, is simply choosing where and when we spend our money. We can be arrested on the street if they don’t like the cut of our jib, but they can’t tell us were we have to spend your money (yet). Stop giving money to fascists. Maybe take part in a collective ‘No Spend Day’, like the one tomorrow, 28 Feb 2025.6 Or don’t buy anything from Amazon between 7 March to 14 March 2025.
One person is not going to get us out of techno-fascism, just like Don Rumata was never going to usher in the renaissance on Arkana by cutting off the head of the hydra at the top of the power structure. The point is, no one person is going to save us from revisiting the 1930 and 1940s, it’s going to have to be at least 3.5% of us. We must be our own heroes.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. I am toying with the idea of creating a monthly book club where we read the things we are commonly told we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about. Non-fiction books and fiction books, because sometimes the curtains are blue for a reason. Let me know if you’d be interested in taking part (even occasionally).
THIS WEEK
Most listened to song: 'Nine to Five' by The Lonely Few (Not the Dolly song, but similar sentiment.)
Favourite thing I’ve watched: The sunset.
Favourite thing I’ve read: ‘Hard To Be A God’ by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
I’m most excited by: Mercury
“Adult Literacy Rates in the UK.” National Literacy Trust, https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/ . Accessed 24 Feb 2025.
Haynes, Ingrid. “Literacy Statistics 2022-2023.” National Literacy, National Literacy, 7 Mar. 2024, https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-statistics-2022-2023. Accessed 24 Feb 2025.
And I can tell that some readers might flinch whenever I mention ‘the state’ - it’s too Marxist, too political, too theoretical, it feels too intellectual to say it - but it’s just a handy term for The People In Charge. The People in Charge are not you or me; you and I don’t make decisions that affect millions of people. The People in Charge are not “Leftists” or “Right-Wingers”, they are self-interested and focussed on protecting the status quo.
Chenoweth, Erica. “The Future of Nonviolent Resistance.” Journal of Democracy, vol. 31, no. 3, July 2020, pp. 69–84. https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-nonviolent-resistance-2/ Accessed 25 Feb 2025
There is a CEO in that article who is quoted as saying a one-day spending freeze won’t move the needle. Firstly, consider why CBS needed to include a quote from a CEO of a financial advisory firm to say ‘This is not going to make any difference, you may as well not bother’. Secondly, consider that CBS might assume readers aren’t going to bother checking out 9i Capita Group to find they have 2-10 employees, is owned by the quoted CEO, and have a cute baseball podcast too.