Politics
Parry envisions the Atlanteans as reverting to the habit of some of the early democracies of ancient Greece, in which some public offices were assigned to citizens by lot. (In Atlantis, in fact, all occupations are assigned by lot; one becomes a farmer, or an Inspector, or fills any other job or profession, purely by chance.)
Parry's American protagonist is astounded to find himself assigned to the Atlantean legislature, the Vorunk, apparently by this method of chance. It is a dreary job that nobody wants, and he amuses himself there by creating even more absurd laws. (He gets snoring declared a crime, punishable by death.) He quickly learns that the people who run Atlantis are corrupt and self-interested, and violate the basic tenets of Atlantean equality to feed their own hunger for power.
Read more about this topic: The Scarlet Empire
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“In politics people throw themselves, as on a sickbed, from one side to the other in the belief they will lie more comfortably.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices.... Politics has once again become religious.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“I have come to the conclusion that the closer people are to what may be called the front lines of government ... the easier it is to see the immediate underbrush, the individual tree trunks of the moment, and to forget the nobility the usefulness and the wide extent of the forest itself.... They forget that politics after all is only an instrument through which to achieve Government.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)