Review: The Hidden Truth. TL;DR? Buy it. Now.

“So I knew that down the road I would have to steer you away, that I would have to lie to you.  And a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths.” – X-Files

 

Neal Stephenson, moving through pages at nearly the speed of light, which is his superhero power (since it is obvious he will never have hair like Wolverine®.  Neal was really neat (true story) when The Boy talked to him a few years ago.  Future post, probably.

There are several books that I’ve made either The Boy or Pugsley read.  They’ve both read Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein.  But the list also includes Dune (Herbert), 1984 (Orwell), Brave New World (Huxley), Cryptonomicon (Stephenson), The Stand (King), Lucifer’s Hammer (Niven and Pournelle), well, and a few others.  You get the idea.

And the idea is ideas – one of the things that books do is they introduce us to ideas and concepts – in many ways they help teach us how to thinks – at least the good books.  I had a boss who was the most Zen boss I ever had.  He was deeply philosophical in an entirely unphilosophical organization and industry.  He liked me quite a lot – since I loved ideas as well.  He had a great saying:  “Books are the way that one mind can talk to another across time.”

I’m adding a book that I’m going to make The Boy and Pugsley read:

I came across this book via a quote I saw on the internet (LINK), and I was hooked.

Here’s the quote from The Hidden Truth.  It’s long.  But it only took me about three seconds after I read it to hit “buy” in Amazon (I’ll note again – I get no money if you buy it here, that’s fine – the author gets sweet, sweet money):

   “The women’s rights movement had three goals.  First, it got women into the workplace where their labor could be taxed . . . .  So, with more women entering the workforce the supply of labor increases and wages are depressed . . . .

“Now couples need to have two careers to support a typical modern lifestyle.  We can’t tax the labor in a home-cooked meal.  We can tax the labor in takeout food, or the higher cost of a microwave dinner. The economic potential of both halves of the adult population now largely flows into the government where it can serve noble ends instead of petty private interests . . . .

“The second reason is to get children out of the potentially antisocial environment of the home and into educational settings where we can be sure they’ll get the right values and learn the right lessons to be happy and productive members of society.  Working mothers need to send their children to daycare and after-school care where we can be sure they get exposed to the right lessons, or at least not to bad ideas . . . .

“They are going to assign homework to their students:  enough homework to guarantee that even elementary school students are spending all their spare time doing homework.  Their poor parents, eager to see that Junior stays up with the rest of the class, will be spending all their time helping their kids get incrementally more proficient on the tests we have designed.  They’ll be too busy doing homework to pick up on any antisocial messages at home . . . .

“Children will be too busy to learn independence at home, too busy to do chores, to learn how to take care of themselves, to be responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, and laundry.  Their parents will have to cater to their little darlings’ every need, and their little darlings will be utterly dependent on their parents.  When the kids grow up, they will be used to having someone else take care of them.  They will shift that spirit of dependence from their parents to their university professors, and ultimately to their government.  The next generation will be psychologically prepared to accept a government that would be intrusive even by today’s relaxed standards – a government that will tell them exactly how to behave and what to think. Not a Big Brother government, but a Mommy-State . . . .

“Eventually, we may even outlaw homeschooling as antisocial, like our more progressive cousins in Germany already do.  Everyone must know their place in society and work together for social good, not private profit . . . .

“The Earth can’t accommodate many more people at a reasonable standard of living. We’re running out of resources.  We have to manage and control our population.  That’s the real motive behind the women’s movement.  Once a women’s studies program convinces a gal she’s a victim of patriarchal oppression, how likely is it she’s going to overcome her indoctrination to be able to bond long enough with a guy to have a big family?  If she does get careless with a guy, she’ll probably just have an abortion . . . .

“All those Career-Oriented Gals are too busy seeking social approval and status at the office to be out starting families and raising kids.  They’re encouraged to have fun, be free spirits, and experiment with any man who catches their fancy . . . .  And by the time all those COGs are in their thirties and ready to try to settle down and have kids, they’re past their prime.  Their fertility peaks in their twenties. It’s all downhill from there . . . .

“In another generation, we’ll have implemented our own version of China’s One-Child-Per-Couple policy without the nasty forced abortions and other hard repressive policies which people hate.  What’s more, there’ll be fewer couples because so many young people will just be hedonistically screwing each other instead of settling down and making families.  Makes me wish I were young again, like you, to take full advantage of it.  The net effect is we’ll enter the great contraction and begin shrinking our population to more controllable levels . . . .

“It’s profoundly ironic.  A strong, independent woman is now one who meekly obeys the media’s and society’s clamor to be a career girl and sleep around with whatever stud catches her fancy or with other girls for that matter.  A woman with the courage to defy that social pressure and devote herself from a young age to building a home and raising a family is an aberration, a weirdo, a traitor to her sex.  There aren’t many women with the balls to stand up against that kind of social pressure.

It’s not in their nature.”

Wow.  Stunning.  And possibly banned in California.

To be clear, I don’t think that there is a conspiracy to create the situation described above, but the outcomes of a huge social experiment are often unclear, and wrapping up the negative social outcomes summarized above into a conspiracy?  Genius!

Those are some huge ideas, and that’s just in one chapter.  There are plenty of ideas, and I’ll admit that I probably know the sources of many of them.  In fact, I’m pretty sure we have many of the same regular watering holes on the web, and probably many of the same values.

But this isn’t like Atlas Shrugged with an 87 page speech that would have taken six days to deliver.  No.  The plot is tight, and the author doesn’t repeat himself.  The book is thrilling – especially the last third.

Interestingly, most of the actual action takes place out of view of the first-person protagonist.  Yes, he talked to that person.  And now that person is dead.  While not the choice of most thrillers, I found it especially effective in this book, especially since it was told in first-person.  Only Bruce Willis gets in a running gunfight with German terrorists – in real life, buildings burn down when we’re not around, even though the burning building might have huge consequences, we’re (mainly) just not around when the amazing thing happens.  This technique makes the book more realistic.

And the plot?  Let’s just say that over a hundred years ago, for mysterious reasons, people started censoring textbooks on electromagnetics.  And killing scientists – all related to a scientific conclusion that Oliver Heaviside.  Heaviside is probably most famous for taking James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations and bringing them into the final form we see today.  (If you’re not familiar, Maxwell was a genius whose work was foundational for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.)  Heaviside was also famous for sporting a cool Wolverine (like in the X-Men) hairdo.

If you like this book (as I most certainly did) then you’ll immediately go out and buy the sequel after you finish the first one.  It’s that good.  And for $0.99, I bought the e-book so I could start reading immediately.

And you should buy this book, too, so we can convince Hans to write some more . . . .