The Lotus Eaters

Chapter Fourteen

One factor that tends to bring this mutual looting about more quickly is the presence of an enfranchised, more or less large, but distinct minority within a generally pluralistic society. This happens quite without reference to race or culture; it is the minority status that drives the event. Perhaps better said, the minority status, because all minorities are or feel they are under threat in one way or another, tends to drive those members to vote as fairly cohesive blocks to defend their perceived interests, even as elites move to exploit those fears for their own ends.

Even where the minorities are relatively wealthy and influential themselves, often governments find they must buy off, rather, seem to be buying off, the population at large to distract attention from programs designed for the benefit of those minorities.

Moreover, we see in the Tauran Union a sincere attempt to create a state composed of nothing but minorities, even as we see a blizzard of currency fly from place to place, interest group to interest group, with the government taking, as usual, its enormous cut.

—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,

Historia y Filosofia Moral,

Legionary Press, Balboa,

Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468