ricketyclick

From Donald Kingsbury’s The Moon Goddess and the Son:

Any god who is a major thinker and a master manipulator can build magnificently to his own design, but, alas, his palace will always crumble for he will have to build it of unfired bricks. There is only only one fire in the universe strong enough to bake enduring bricks: the flame of thought. And yet, whoever builds his edifice out of thinking men, cannot build to his own design for his bricks will be having a say about where they are put. Alas to be a god!

This is the core insight underlying capitalism and libertarianism. Both socialism and Islamism shun this kiln, and so their bricks always crumble.

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Kingsbury’s story telling tends to be a bit clunky. Moon Goddess and Son was stitched together out of a couple of short stories, and it shows. Everybody in it seems to speak with Kingsbury’s voice. I still highly recommend it for his analysis of Russian history and little nuggets of political insights like these. (I wish I could find someone who actually knew Russian history to tell me how accurate it is.)

And, despite its clunkiness, the story’s rollicking good fun, for an engineering sensibility.

Tags: capitalism, islamism, Kingsbury, Russia, Russian, socialism

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Army of Davids, Edumakashun, Philosophy, Politics & Politicians, Quote of the Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.