The Lotus Eaters

Chapter Twenty-three

The key, then, to good and long lasting governance is to reduce the dosage of toxic elements, to drive away and exclude from political power as many of those people who lack the requisite civic virtue as can be positively identified. Implicitly, this requires admitting to political power as many of those who have civic virtue as also can be positively identified.

As we have seen, breeding fails. Wealth? There are many wealthy thieves. Education? The world is full of educated derelicts, utterly self-centered and completely devoid of civic virtue.

Motherhood? Leave aside that sons and daughters vote their parents interests, and that men vote their wives and sisters, to boot, thus giving mothers a great deal of indirect political power already. Motherhood indicates an interest in the future, but only for the narrow family, not for society as a whole. Remember that a small number of wealthy and connected Spartan mothers, in the interests of their own narrow gene pool, took control of the property of the society, economically ruining the rest, thus driving them out of membership in the sistisia, and ruining thereby both the army and the state.

We must further beware of assigning civic virtue to any calling, be it ever so beneficial to society, that a person does because he simply enjoy it, or derives self-satisfaction from it. A socially beneficial calling, as far as the realm of civic virtue is concerned, exists parallel to those which entail civic virtue.

—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,

Historia y Filosofia Moral,

Legionary Press, Balboa,

Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468