Butler: Erewhon (1872)

I just finished listening to the librivox.org recording of Samuel Butler‘s Erewhon or, Over the Range. It is a mixture of travelogue about New Zealand, an utopia of a peaceful society and a dystopia of a country with reversed values compared to ours.  By “ours” I mean the Victorian era it was written in and what if seems to criticize. The book worked my mind hard as I tried to follow its logic regarding the college of unreason, the system of societal values where health was regarded a moral issue. i.e. being sick was a punishable crime. At the same time what we consider crime was treated by “straighterners”, acting as medical doctors would. Butler used the book as a platform to share his views on other topics, such as machines becoming conscious and stronger than us, thus needed to be destroyed. It would take more time than I have to give a thorough analysis of his book and plenty of people did it in the past before me. Thus I refrain from it, just tell you that it was worth reading this classic book, it gives you plenty to think about our current values systems and assumptions.