America: Optimistic or Greedy
Last night was the wrap party for the Visual Effects work on I, Robot. Unsurprisingly some of the conversation was about the difference between Isaac Asimov's world with robots as envisioned back in the 1950s, and our contemporary, darker view. This got me to thinking about the dramatic divide between what America used to try to be, and what it now tries to do. This distinction can be simplified into a distinction between America as an optimistic society, as opposed to America as a greedy society. One of the most striking themes that runs through a lot of the classical sci-fi, and which strikes as us so naive today, is the unspoken belief that the purpose of scientific and technological progress is to improve the lives of all humanity. This was a time when we, as a society, saw ourselves as locked in a bitter struggle with godless communism, which we faced down not with piety and open markets, but good old American know-how. The fundamental premise of the mythology of the cold war was that we were going to band together and out-innovate the Soviets, and that the result of that would be a better world for everyone.
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