Excerpt from Second Game. A shor t story from the 1950's by Chrles De Vet and Kathleen Maclean. This is a cullture based on a need for struggle, for combat. The cultures based on its impetuous need to battle... it is armed and set aganst dangers and the expectation of danger... fostering the pride of courage under stress. There is no danger now, nothing to fight, no place to spend your over aggressiveness,except against each other in personal duels. Already your decline is about to enter the bloody circus and religious stage, already crumbling in the heart while expanding at the outside. And this is your first technological civilization, like a boys first love, you have no experience of a fall in your history before there is recource to no modern philosophy to accept it. You cannot win the war. You will seem to win, but it will be an illusion.`You will win battles, kill billions, rape nations, take slaves, and destroy ships and weapons. But after that you will be forced to hold the subjection. Your numbers will not be expendable. You will be spread thin, exposed to other cultures that will influence you, change you. You will lose skirmishes, and in the end you will be forced back. Then will come a loss of old ethics, corruption and opportunism will replace honor and you will know unspeakable shame and dishonor, and your cul- ture will soon be weltering back into a barbarism and disorganization which in its corruption and despair will be nothing like the proud tribal primitive life of its first barbarism. You will be aware of the difference and be unable to return. The shortage of women sponsors a covert despair and sadism in our young men, a hunger and star- vation to follow instinct, to win women by courage and conquest and battle and danger, that only a war can restrain.

Yes, it sounds like modern America...