Mankind's lot, Cartwright ruminated, hadn't changed much, of late. The Classification system, the elaborate Quizzes, hadn't done many people any good.
In the early twentieth century the problem of production had been solved; after that, it was the problem of consumption that plagued society. In the nineteen fifties and sixties consumer commodities and farm products began to pile up in towering mountains all over the Western World. As much as possible was given away—but that threatened to subvert the open market. By 1980 the pro tem solution was to heap up the products and burn them—billions of dollars' worth, week after week.
Each Saturday townspeople had collected in sullen, resentful crowds to watch the troops squirt petrol on the cars and clothes and oranges and coffee and cigarettes that nobody could buy, igniting them in a blinding bonfire. In each town there was a burning-place, fenced off, where the fine things that could not be purchased were systematically destroyed.
The Quizzes had helped, a trifle. If people couldn't afford to buy the expensive manufactured goods, they could still hope to win them. The economy was propped up for decades by elaborate give-away devices that dispensed tons of glittering merchandise. But for every man who won a car and a refrigerator and a television set there were millions who didn't. Gradually, over the years, prizes in the Quizzes grew from material commodities to more realistic items: power and prestige. And at the top, the final exalted post: the dispenser of power, the Quizmaster.
The disintegration of the social and economic system had been gradual. It went so deep that people lost faith in natural law itself. Nothing seemed stable or fixed; the universe was a sliding flux. Nobody knew what came next. Nobody could count on anything. Statistical prediction became popular; the very concept of cause and effect died out. People lost faith in the belief that they could control their environment.