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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do. As I recall, the worst punishment you can get in the culture is being "Drone Slapped," which is just to have a drone follow you around and make sure you don't do any bad stuff (like kill more people if you are a murderer who wants to kill more people). This preserves considerably more autonomy than, for instance, a life sentence in prison.

I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.

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Most chiefdoms, proto-monarchies and monarchies in human history have had totally inalienable rights for a select few people and it's arguable to say that some states in the world today continue that tradition.

A more grounded criticism, however, is that in the modern world the range of lifestyles and careers available to most free adults is circumscribed only by their wealth, health, the laws of nature and the ability of other humans to enforce prohibitions. Competition from existing political units already exists, but nobody has it guaranteed that if they formed a new polity it would merely be a kayfabe contained inside one or more existing states.

(I think the Culture doing this is a good thing, incidentally, but it does count as removing #1.)

>> To be a human person is to have:

>> * autonomy

>> * internal (mental) [sovereignty]

> I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do.

> I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.

No. I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.

So they try their best to preserve the illusion of 1 and 2, while doing away with them as much as possible.

I just don't read it that way - they certainly try to remove what they see as bad, but beyond that they do not interfere. We don't need to guess about it. Three is plenty of first person Mind stuff in The Culture where Minds communicate with one another. Its pretty clear that Culture Minds have agendas other than total control of the citizens. It is too bad Banks isn't alive to chime in, but I think if you read all the books, its hard to support your interpretation.

> I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.

You read that in Consider Phlebas, where the anti-Culture protagonist claimed it. You’ve fallen for propaganda in a work of fiction.

Propaganda is often not false, or at least not fully false.

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