Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Struldbrug Corporation


Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726. In 1726, the East India Company was 125 years old.


Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. With the links stripped out. I'm highlighting particularly relevant parts of the Struldbrug article, and striking out particularly irrelevant things. The story is different, but the essentials are today as they have always been.

Struldbrug

In Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, the name struldbrug is given to those humans in the nation of Luggnagg who are born seemingly normal, but are in fact immortal. However, although struldbrugs do not die, they do nonetheless continue aging. Swift's work depicts the evil of immortality without eternal youth.

They are easily recognized by a red dot above their left eyebrow. They are normal human beings until they reach the age of thirty, at which time they become dejected. Upon reaching the age of eighty they become legally dead, and suffer from many ailments including the loss of eyesight and the loss of hair.

Struldbrugs were forbidden to own property:
As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands, or take leases...
Because:
Otherwise, as avarice is the necessary consequence of old age, those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public.
 
If ya let 'em live forever, they end up owning everything.

Otherwise... those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public.

2 comments:

Clonal said...

You might also be interested in Jonathan Swift

Quote:
Swift was not the only one to launch such attacks. In 1701, jobbers of the East India Company tried to rig parliamentary elections and take over the Bank of England, two decades later the South Sea Bubble burst (1719-20). Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), who was twice declared bankrupt and died hiding out in Cripplegate from creditors, wrote a series of pamphlets attacking jobbers and their fellow travellers, Villainy of stock-jobbers detected (1701), Political History of the Devil (1726), 'the trade of soul-selling, like our late more eminent bubbles', Life of Jonathan Wild (1725), General History of Pyrates (1724), History of Pyrates(1728). In London, 1722, a murderer considered his crimes to be a trifle compared with those of the Directors of the South Sea Bubble; 'To cut Men's heads off is but a trifle to them'. No longer was wealth to be based on men's honest toil, instead on unsubstantiated opinion and trickery.

Jazzbumpa said...

Of course, tax-free inheritance ultimately accomplishes the same thing, without all the tedious mucking around with immortality.

Cf: Koch Brothers.

WASF,
JzB