Throughout the week, I’ve been reflecting on Sándor Szathmári’s great work of social satire, Voyage to Kazohinia. The work critiques a number of social institutions, but largely seems to focus on a broader question: is an ideal society one at equilibrium or one which embraces extremes?

Szathmári presents this question by introducing us, through the shipwrecked Englishman Gulliver, to two contrasting societies: the brilliant, efficient and loveless Hins and the backwards, chaotic, and destructive Behins.

Given the Hin’s complete lack of love, art, and unique character, one might be inclined to favor the mad but passionate world of the Behins, though Szathmári clearly seems to favor the ordered society of the Hins.

Following the principal of kazo – mathematical clarity – the Hins naturally act “so that the individual, through society, reaches the greatest possible well-being and comfort.” The Behins, on the other hand, are “kazi” – a term for the irrationality which captures everything not kazo.

While I have commented this week on the arguments favoring both types of communities and on reasons why we might want to force a choice between the two rather than just rejecting the premise all together, I have yet to actually answer the question for myself.

On this topic, I have found myself greatly torn.

On the one hand, the peaceful, equitable, and rational world of the Hins is clearly the more reasonable of the two societies. Nearly every logical thought argues in its favor.

Yet the Hin’s lack of art, of passion, of love seems too much to bear. It nearly seems worth sacrificing peace and equity for these peculiarities that make us so deeply human.

Furthermore, being generally inclined to favor unpopular opinions makes me want to argue for the Behinistic perspective on principle. If the kazo world of the Hins is so clearly the rational choice, the troublemaker and contrarian in me just has to push against it.

This instinct is quite clearly kazi.

Additionally, that proud desire to be kazi in the face of all reason strikes me as potentially little more than an arrogantly American trait.

One of my Japanese teachers once told me that she couldn’t understand why Americans took such pride in being individualistic. We fancy ourselves as standing up against the crowd, as being brave radicals willing to boldly buck conventional norms. My teacher just laughed. You think doing what you want is hard? Doing what’s best for others is harder.

As something of an aside here, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that in addition to being a clever critique of western society at large, Szathmári’s novel brilliantly satirizes the west’s Orientalism.

The Hins – whose philosophy I previously compared to Lao Tzu‘s – encapsulates everything “the west” thinks of “the east.” They do not, of course, reflect any real culture existing in the world, but our English Gulliver views them exactly as he might if he had found himself among any of the real peoples of East Asia.

Gulliver comments that “the Behins respected the Hins very much even though they loathed them,” a sentiment which perfectly encapsulates Gulliver’s own attitude. He is impressed by their efficiency and technological innovations, but hates their uniformity and dispassion.

This duality epitomizes the sentiments of Orientalism, and is particularly resonant of western views of Japan around the second world war, when Kazohinia was written. It is no accident that Gulliver was being deployed to Japan when he was shipwrecked.

The Behins, on the other hand, represent the west as it is, disrobed from the vain glory in which it sees itself. One could also make a strong argument that the Behins represent eastern views of the west, but either way Szathmári seems to write in the hopes of convincing his Behinistic western audience to be a little less kazi – using our own stereotypes to highlight our failings and the true ideal we neglect.

And thus I come to my final conclusion. While I put little stock in the gross over-generalizations of cultures, whether as a product of my culture or a product of my experiences, I find myself irreparably kazi. I know rationally that the kazo life is better, but I cannot accept it; I could not survive.

Like Foucault, I’m inclined to find that madness is little more than a social construct and, like Lewis Carroll, I’m inclined to believe we are all mad here.

The whole world is kazi, and – while I’d like to work to make the world a little more kazo – I’m no less Behin than anyone else.

Ironically, it would be kazi to assume otherwise. Throughout Gulliver’s time among the Behins he finds people who rightly mock the foolish beliefs and invented norms of their kazi peers. The greatest error comes, though, when these Behins don’t recognize the same foolishness within themselves. They simply substitute one kazi belief for another.

To not recognize one’s own Behinity, then, seems the height of madness.

At the end of the novel, Szathmári tells as about a certain kind of Behin “whose only Behinity is that he doesn’t realize among whom he lives; for it could not be imagined, could it, that someone aware of the Behinistic disease would still want to explain reality to them?”

I take this as a direct appeal to the reader: having been enlightened as to the Behinistic disease and possibly identifying Behinistic traits within ourselves, we are urged to move beyond our kazi instincts and embrace the better path of kazo. The Hins, we learn, were once Behins themselves.

This is, perhaps, a wise argument, but, in typical fashion, I find myself siding with Camus. The world is indeed absurd and the only thing left is to embrace that absurdity.

Is it possible to have the good without the bad? Does beauty create ugliness and does love beget hate?

These questions are often explored in dystopian fiction, but Szathmári Sándor’s Voyage to Kazohinia is notable in its resounding answer. Yes, these opposites endlessly create each other, Szathmári argues, and thus is it better to have neither.

It is better to leave passion and madness behind in favor of the calm stability of reason.

Perhaps this seems like not such a bold claim. Reason is certainly favorable, and ugliness and hate should be gladly left behind.

Yet, it is not quite as simple as that. The premise of the question finds that to abandon hate is to give up love, that defeating all the ills of society can only be accomplished by relinquishing the passion and spirit we hold most dear.

The perfect society is the monotonous society. Ideal and unchanging.

In making this point, Szathmári introduces us to the Hins. Technologically advanced, the Hins suffer no hunger or conflict. They live in equilibrium and harmony, through the mathematical clarity of kazo. They have no need for police or money; no need for government institutions regulating behavior. They each behave perfectly and have, quite sincerely, a perfect society.

But there is, perhaps, something unsatisfying in their existence.

We meet the Hins through Gulliver, our proud English protagonist. And while we might join the author in snickering at his cultural absurdities, there is one element of Gulliver’s impression of the Hins which resonates.

It starts with small observations. The Hins, we learn, “have no expression for taking delight in something.” A crowded beach is bathed in silence; among the Hins, “everybody was a stranger; not a single greeting was to be heard. Each simply did not exist for the other.”

Our hero begins struggling against this dispassionate view. He is impressed by the technological advancement of the Hins, but distraught by their seeming lack of feeling and soul. He desperately seeks to explain his culture to his Hin acquaintance, Zatamon, who interprets his words through the core Hin concepts of kazo, mathematical perfection, and its opposite, kazi.

After Gulliver carefully explains a number of concepts – friend, hatred, wife, happiness, theater, art, and political parties – Zatamon expresses his disappointment:

In your country the kazo is considered to apply to certain groups only, which, however, already means that it is not kazo as you do not observe it where others are concerned. Because you imagine some persons closer to yourselves and favor them, this can only be done at the same time you offer less or nothing to others. That is, both the things you give your friends and those you do not give others bear all the marks of the kazi concept. These friends do not receive out of need, or on the basis of a general state of equilibrium – at least this is what I gather from your words – but purely because you have invented the kazi idea of ‘friendship.’

…And as for the word ‘love,’ it seems to me you wish to indicate with this that people outside an exclusive circle are to be treated beneath the merit of their existence. But why do you call the same thing hatred on other occasions?

The Hins have no love or beauty or friendship because the mere conceptualization of such things existing indicates the existence of their opposites. They throw society out of balance, bring disharmony where harmony would exist otherwise. This might seem a tragic loss to our own kazi sensibilities, but giving up the extremes in favor of equilibrium is clearly the logical thing to do.

It should be noted, of course, that the philosophy which Szathmári advances here is by no means unique to the fictional Hins. Consider this eloquent passage from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

“Practice not-doing,” Lao Tzu advises, “and everything will fall into place.”

That is kazo.

This way of thinking is in bold contrast to the conclusions of others who have pondered this challenge of duality.

In 1959 – eighteen years after Kazohinia, but before it was translated to English – American author Robert Heinlein comes to a different conclusion in his novel Starship Troopers.

Heinlein similarly sees a tension between an idyllic but mundane society and a passionate society of hardship and growth.

Writing in the early years of the Vietnam War, Heinlein imagines a paradise planet called Sanctuary. Life is easy on Sanctuary, a tempting home for weary soldiers. But, while Szathmári genuinely advocates for the lifestyle of the Hins, Heinlein is clear that he sees such an appealing ideal as a trap.

The descendants of Sanctuary colonists will not evolve. “So what happens?” Heinlein asks. “Do they stay frozen at their present level while the rest of the human race moves on past them, until they are living fossils, as out of place as a pithecanthropus in a space ship?”

For Heinlein, it is not problematic that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are inextricably intertwined – both are a necessary part of human existence. Indeed, it is the challenge of living which truly makes us alive. Life on Sanctuary is no life at all.

This is the view of our Gulliver among the Hins. While Szathmári seems to advocate for the ideal society of the Hins, he knows such a view is unlikely to be adopted easily. Becoming fully acquainted with the dull, effortless, efficiency of Hin life, our hero finds himself filled with despair.

A feeling of terrible powerlessness came over me. I was buried alive among the dead in this island in the suffocating atmosphere of which the life-thirsty lung panted in vain. And there was no escape. I was to wither away here, without air and life…

Thus finding the Hins to be efficient but lifeless automatons, and painfully deprived of the passions he deems living, our hero makes his escape. He goes to live amongst the Behins, those  beings which the Hins find to be incurably kazi. 

Life amongst the Behins is so mad as to be hardly worth relaying. Gulliver is relieved to leave the colorless world of the Hins, only to find his new home “the most terrible bedlam in the world.”

Of course, the Behins are hardly more mad than we are. They greet each other with meaningless phrases and useless physical contact. They follow a convoluted set of social norms which are constantly changing and entirely unpredictable. They divide themselves into constantly warring factions that fight over nothing more than whether the circle or square is a more perfect geometric shape. They create work that doesn’t need to be done in order to enforce an arbitrary system in which the rich earn more than the poor. They are embarrassed to speak of basic physical processes (such as eating). They use metaphors which don’t in any way relate to the actual objects they are discussing. Women pay to have their faces mutilated in the name of beauty.

Yes, the Behins are quite mad.

This then, is the price of accepting the extremes. Of taking in love, hate, joy, and despair. It does, indeed, disrupt the unchanging world of the Hins, but while Heinlein sees these extremes as the essence of life, Szathmári argues the opposite – such madness is not life at all.

And while you are pondering which type of life makes you more alive, there is one more element of Szathmári’s deeply amusing satire worth mentioning.

In Behinistic society, people who speak the truth, who exercise reason, are frequently burned at the stake. Therefore, as Gulliver explains:

If one wanted to say something particularly sensible and dangerous he put a cap and bells on his head and put his fingers into his mouth. And the Behins listened to him with great amusement…

These makrus, as they were known, are the only ones who are free to speak the truth; at the cost that they are laughed at and never understood.

While “some openly described how stupid and wretched the Behin life was,” listeners always believed the words of a makru to apply only to their enemies. “…It never occurred to them that all the vile words the makrus wrote also applied to their own lives.”

In fact, while living amongst the Behins Gulliver begins writing the travel diary which we are ostensibly reading. His friend discovers the text and, finding his own name frequently amid the list of mad occurrences, asks out loud who that name is supposed to represent.

Yet this same friend guffaws moments later finding distasteful but accurate descriptions of a local dignitary. The friend encourages Gulliver to publish his comical work, assuring him that he need not fear the dignitary’s wrath: “How do you imagine that he would recognize himself?”

Considering the opportunity to publish his work among the Behins, our Gulliver reflects:

The proposal was enticing but after some thinking I realized that for the very same reason there was no point in publishing it. How could it be imagined that reading it would make them even one iota cleverer or would render their lives one jot more endurable with such a lack of comprehension? Should I publish the account of my travels? It deserved a lot better than to be object of idiots’ imbecilic guffaws.