Our Colonised Planets 19 and 22 were for several millennia agricultural paradises, with not a town to be seen and both consciously planned and developed to avoid the growth of villages larger than marketplaces for the exchange of goods. There were mass movements of mainly young people whose aim was only to reach either of these planets or to conquer a new one. These movements had all the characteristics of the “religions” that afflicted Rohanda in its period of decline and degeneration. To “live simply,” to “get back to nature,” seemed to nearly everyone the solution to all our new problems. But this phase, too, passed, when it became evident that these artificial schemes, these expedients, did not succeed in stilling the inner drive towards transcendence, both social and personal. There are still such farms, such ideas, in existence, but they have long been understood by everyone as pathetic regressions.

It was by then clear to us that we needed a drastic decrease in population. To state this is enough to raise the questions that then ravaged us all. Were we saying that the conditions of our existence in our Empire were to be governed entirely by economic factors? That the lives of our peoples should be judged solely by the levels of our technical achievements? Of course it goes without saying that when the question was put like this, the answer was that the numbers of populations, and their ways of living, had always been governed by economic factors: all that had happened was that famines, floods, diseases, had been replaced by the consequences of technical development. Nothing had changed: that was the argument. No need to torment ourselves now about questions about the purpose of life, the value of the individual, and so forth. Had we pondered and agonised over the results of natural disasters? Yes? Had this done any good? No? Then were we now prepared to agonise and torment ourselves over equally uncontrollable factors?