The Republic of Heaven

What specifically would have happened if Lyra hadn't 'fallen'? How would the lack of Dust affect us? What might happen to society?

abc wrote:What specifically would have happened if Lyra hadn't 'fallen'? How would the lack of Dust affect us? What might happen to society?

Dust would have continued to filter out of the universe as would concousness, so Free Will and all would have been destroyed forever and we would be under direct control of the Kingdom of Hevern.

Would we still be under direct control of the Kingdom of Heaven even though God and Metatron had died and all the dead had been let out?

We'd be people walking around, acting like smart monkeys...

Make that "smart monkeys walking around, acting like people". That essential something that makes us conscious would be gone. Even if we acted the same, we wouldn't be able to feel the same.

Ah, funny. I think we'd be reduced to essentially instincts, which would make us rather barbaric and the like...

perhaps animals would not be the ideal subjects of the authority, it seems to me that often the authority is trying to restrict animal impulses and rather than turn people into wild, impulse-indulging 'barbarians', make them suffering to such suffering, drudgery, manipulation and deception that they lose sight of beauty, hope, freedom, passion, and emotion. animals, in my opinion, are not blind soulless machines, but similar to us than different. how much animals are really like people we may never know, but I do not think that animals are the perfect model for the ideals of the authority's subjects.

Well, the Authority's overall idea was to limit free thought, to withhold all the facts but give the ones (or distortions) that bestowed the most power to him. Animals could hold reverence for a certain site or being as well as a human, and they'd never think about it.

yeah, I think what the Authority wanted most was mindlessness, subjects who would question nothing, who he could manipulate however he wanted.

I think we would retrogress intellectually....if Eve hadn't "fallen," i. e. gained wisdom/knowledge, (metaphorically speaking) there would be nothing separating us from animals...we'd slowly become mindless (as people have already said). Hey -- do you think that PP was making a point that this is already happening in our world? Makes sense to me...I've never thought about it that way before... it reminds me of a Cake lyric: "We've got to keep this traffic flowing and accept a little sin" (although I think it's really "spin." Oh well, we can pretend.) Is that Pullman's message?

I don't know. I always saw it in a more applicable sense: religious fanatics say that this, that, and the other thing are dangerous because they challenge the faith. Well, if the faith can't stand scrutiny, then who should believe in it? I always thought that that was Pullman's idea.

I think he intended for both ideas to come through in the books, and they did.

Just read the bible, it says something like.
'Eve took the apple from the tree and ate it with her husband who was also there.' after that they became wise and understood good and evil, black and white, yin and yang etc.
'They became aware of their nakedness and sewed fig leaves around their bodies to hide it. When god came they hid for they were ashamed, "Adam? Eve? Where are you?" they emerged from a bush with their figgy clothes. "Why have you sewn fig leaves together, who told you you were naked?" '
Then they just explained abouit the serpent.


So if you read it, they weren't animal stupid, they were just in a type of ignorant bliss, they picked wisdom over that.

But lets face it, they mean effectively the same thing. Animal life functions very much on a need-to-know basis. Most of the 'dumb animals' do things without having a clue why they do them. Nature only calls on intelligence when the habitat is too complicated to be dealt with by a set of established rules ('instinct'). That's where we come in, though it's still relative, and only a proportion of what we do is governed by independant thought.

So ignorance and animal programming are two of the same.

true, true.............
*dies*

Funny how in Narnia Lewis also celebrates the shedding of animal-ignorance in The Magician's Nephew when Aslan gives animals the gift of speech. "From the dumb animals you were taken, and to them you can return".

And some people already have...wake up and smell the politicians...

You know, I'd rather not, thanks...

That's true. They tend to smell like fish...

I don't think we have any of those types. They're all old men in this country.