Noise (22 page)

For Salvage, anarchy seems to be the motivating philosophy behind their eagerness for the Event. If they no longer have to fear imprisonment (or worse) for ignoring someone else’s ideas about “law” or “morality,” then they are free to remake society as they please—to correct the wrongs and traumas they’ve endured in their lives. Ironically, the
Book
tells us that one must control disposition, morality, and behavior to effect a successful New State, which is about as far from anarchy as possible. (I think this dovetails nicely with what I said before about personal utopias.)

To answer your last question: I don’t see society in this state of regress, and I’m not one who believes that philosophical anarchy can “work.” It’s true that society, law, culture, and even religion form a sort of property-insurance gestalt, which takes a bit of the magic out of what it means to “have” a nationality. Most of our laws, and what we believe about them, are designed to prevent us from enjoying freedoms at someone else’s expense, but that makes for a boring national identity.

Certainly, there’s a thin line, which Salvage watches for eagerly—the line between a pacified, law-abiding nation and a culture-wide realization that their property is no longer insured by the state—including their own lives—but I don’t see that line breaking down anytime soon.

S:
That’s a relief! The
Book
is definitely one of my favorite aspects of, well, the book, especially as much of this advice seems
like it’s a very sound plan for getting through a Collapse. Can you explain your process (and, perhaps, your inspiration) for what is essentially a guide to escaping a broken society and forming a new one?

DB:
Like I mentioned before, the
Book
came first. I had the story in mind, but I needed to establish the specifics of the Salvage philosophy before I could really explore what that philosophy would mean for the people adhering to it.

So, buckle up—this is going to take a minute.

I began by conceptualizing a proto-nation—a simple survival group—and worked my way backward. That is, I tried to consider things like ethnic conflict, transnational trade, territorialism, religion, politics, and so on. I drew the very simple conclusion (and I’m not the first to do so) that resources (specifically, controlling them) determine everything. Once my proto-nation had found a way to feed itself, find water, and avoid dying from exposure (to the elements or to enemies), it could begin to establish its Narrative, which I see as the next essential step to survival. Without an idea who “we” are, it becomes difficult to determine who is allowed to consume our resources. And if there is no “us,” we won’t even be able to effectively band together to defend the resources we control.

In my model, if you destabilize the things that underpin civility and humanitarianism, then you can’t afford to do the “good” thing and share your resources with anyone in need. Certainly, you
could
share, but ultimately, you’d starve. Essentially, I thought about “humanity” as inconstant—that is, while we typically think that we are ourselves (our identities) all the time, I pursued the idea that we aren’t. I mean, when I’m staring at the television, mindlessly, I’m not attending to all of my personal philosophies, fears, anxieties, etc. I’m a little less “me.” According
to the
Book
, the same principle applies when you’re starving, worrying about enemies, or simply spending all day cultivating food. You have less time to consider things like personal religion or philosophy—you are a little less “you” than you are right now, calmly reading these pages. I think we often forget that the things we hold so dear (and that we fight so much about)—like who created the universe or who is allowed to get married to whom—are luxuries that evolved with us only as we banded together and gradually created those free-time opportunities to simply attend to the strange images in our heads. At one point in our history, we certainly cared a lot more about killing and eating things than we did about who might be watching us from the clouds.

Still with me?

S:
Still with you.

DB:
So, this “inconstant self” thinking enabled me to strip away my conceptual reservations about things like killing someone for his or her food, or preemptively attacking a neighboring community simply because you can’t take the risk that they might do it to you first. The
Book
then became an involved set of ideas to facilitate a new cultural Narrative—one that helps define “us versus them,” that defines how the cultural world works and what citizens have to do to fit in. It became about maximizing the contributions of each citizen for the strength of the whole. It became about preemptively convincing the “Group” that it is always right and that “Outsiders” are always wrong—in fact, they’re inhuman. Which, you know, isn’t a revolutionary idea; religion and culture have been struggling for millennia to establish the particular “correctness,” the better “person-ness,” of one group over another.

So, really, the hardest part was creating a realistic perspective on the complete collapse of civility. After that, I decided that my emphasis would be on personal energy, since in this situation, one would have to constantly replenish it with food, water, and rest. Most of us don’t worry about this
right now
because we have ready access to all these things (helping someone push a stalled car out of an intersection is a fine thing to do now—you can replace the lost calories later. But if helping this person meant you’d have less energy to protect yourself from a mugging later, because you couldn’t replace the calories or safely rest, would you still help? Many of us would, and we would, in turn, be murdered by people who wouldn’t, because we would be weaker than they. I tried to take this idea of “conservation” to its most logical extremes, in an urban setting, and what you see in the
Book
is the result.

S:
To follow up on something you mentioned earlier: You were talking about the irony of how the
Book
, although a product of Salvage, is actually advocating a philosophy that seems almost wholly different (anarchy versus organization). Can you go into that a little more?

DB:
Sure. The Book is decidedly non-anarchic; it advocates organization, distributions of power, and collective opportunism. In a way, it makes sense that this is what Salvage would have generated: After all, they were creating this rebellious social model as a reaction against what they saw as the failing of free-market capitalism (and the social problems it entails). However, a world organized according to the
Book
depends first upon the collapse of the old model (Old Trade), which would result (Salvage believes) in anarchy. Anarchy is a crime under the old model, and Salvage doesn’t want its people tied up in jail, killed by riot police,
or otherwise out of the picture before the game even gets started—which is why the
Book
is so clear that it’s outlining a
reaction
to anarchy, not a plan to cause it. But, of course, once the Salvage hive-mind really gets going, mob mentality takes over and the
Book
gets (in some ways) misused.

S:
One of the key issues in the novel is the idea of renaming and masking. One thing I was wondering, though, is eventually—when Amaranth is firmly established—will they ever go back to their old names? Do you think they even could, if they wanted to? Or, as it is a new society, are these new identities permanent?

DB:
I think that depends on whether or not (and how) Amaranth succeeds. If everything goes according to plan (which I don’t think it would), and they become a strong, self-sufficient city-state, then the Members might certainly have time to be “more” themselves, like I mentioned above. That would mean, for most, attending to the horrible things they’ve done and the people they left behind. Retaking their given names would essentially mean reassuming their old identities, which are, morally, the guilty parties in this situation. It seems to me that would be pretty traumatic, and it could quickly drag the city-state out of its success—not everyone would want to revisit the past (I don’t think Hiram would), so it would likely create friction between the two groups, especially since the accusation on one side is that their entire lives are lies and that they’re just playing the biggest game of pretend ever.

But at the same time, if life is difficult, if there isn’t time to sit around and think about what you’ve done, then it would be less likely that Members would even revisit the issue of their old names (the
Book
is quite against it, and it’s certainly the closest
thing to a new cultural religion that they have). And, you know, the mind is pretty elastic. It’s capable of fascinating maneuvers that protect the body-mind from trauma—that keep it functioning in difficult circumstances. Self-doubt wouldn’t be good for survival, so I think whoever was first to want to reclaim his or her old name would likely be made an example of … before the trend caught on. Their new identities, after all, protect them from their old ones.

S:
Interesting—you don’t think Amaranth will succeed? Or simply that it won’t go according to plan? Are the two things mutually exclusive?

DB:
I wish I could say. When I look at what the
Book
has to say and then compare that against how Hiram and the others interpret it, I can’t help but see, in places, a disconnect—the misuse I mentioned before. Clearly, Hiram and his allies follow many of the rules
exactly
, but not
all
of them—and it’s important to remember that the version of the
Book
that we see is unique to Hiram and Levi. Undoubtedly, they encountered other rules, suggestions, or directives that they simply didn’t envision in
their Book
. What might be missing that we simply can’t conceptualize? Which threats or realities are they not prepared for? I thought of a few, which I removed from the
Book
on purpose, but I’m not telling … I think that if Amaranth is going to succeed, and if Hiram is going to have the first crack at “Final Leader” (it seems to me that he will), then he needs to learn a few vital lessons very quickly, or he’ll die (and possibly get everyone else killed, too). At the end of the novel, he’s almost there, but not quite, which is how I wanted to leave him. In a very dark way, it’s the closest thing to “hope”—to a redemptive ending—that I can tolerate.

S:
Even though your characters struggle with it at points, do you think it would be easy to transition to the violence they engage in? Is that why the ceremony of it is so key?

DB:
No, I think it would be very difficult for the vast majority of people. In his book
On Killing
, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman cites the ominously titled WWII study “Combat Neuroses: Development of Combat Exhaustion” by R. L. Swank and W. E. Marchand. Grossman parses the study to reveal that only about 2 percent of combat soldiers are predisposed to be “aggressive psychopaths” and hence do not experience the same reservations about killing that the rest of us (and the rest of most soldiers) do. Until the Vietnam War, when the United States began new programs to overcome a soldier’s resistance to killing, most soldiers spent most of their time missing the targets they fired at (both intentionally and subconsciously)—Grossman’s book offers some fantastic data regarding this.

Generally, we don’t like hurting one another, so, for example, picking up a sword and swinging it at a woman’s legs, like Hiram does, would be
incredibly
traumatic. In fact, it’s not likely (statistically speaking) to happen, despite whatever stories about toughness we may tell ourselves.

Now, I think that as time goes by and these reservations about violence start to fade in the interest of self-defense and survival, things would change. Violence against Outsiders would become easier—being part of an “us” would give people somewhere productive to channel their humanity while simultaneously becoming more and more irrationally angry at “them.” But the initial transition would be so incredibly difficult that most of us wouldn’t make it.

As you suggest, this is why Salvage is so adamant about masks and names and narratives. If you’re going to survive the
Collapse, Salvage believes, you can’t be slow to adjust—you have to become comfortable with harming others
now
. By wearing a mask or war paint or a uniform, you get to be somebody else—and that person is responsible for the violence, not you.

And you know, these ideas aren’t particular to Salvage—think about the types of people in our societies who sometimes have to kill others, like law enforcement personnel or soldiers. We change the language—they aren’t committing “murder,” it’s just doing what’s “right” for the national interest. We give them uniforms (costumes), ranks, sequestered fellowships, ceremonies, parades, and so forth. We call them by their last names, or by their nicknames. We do everything we can to help them overcome the aversion to violence in an organized fashion. And then we assure them that “what you did was right,” to assuage guilt in the hope that they’ll do it again.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not making a value judgment—in fact, I have great respect for soldiers and policemen, both of which run in my family—but all of these techniques we employ demonstrate, I think, that we don’t like bashing one another with two-by-fours or shoving people off of cliffs or shooting at them.

And maybe that, in the end, is what will redeem us.

S:
Is that, ultimately then, what you want people to take away from
Noise?

DB:
No. I won’t say that
Noise
has no message (that would be naïve), but I wouldn’t cite redemption as a contender. I dislike redemption in literature because it’s more often a fairy tale than an aspect of meaningful existence. We may often hope for or seek redemption, but I think it’s a rare find, and celebrating (or even portraying it) in fiction feels like a scam.