I’m Mark Davies for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2024 Spring Read.
Published in 2012, The Water Thief, by Nicholas Lamar Soutter is a novel about a dystopian near-future in which all semblances of democratic republics have given way to a thoroughgoing corporatism based on Ayn Rand’s Objectivist vision of a society ruled by corporations and governed by corporate executives who have risen to power by fully embracing their greed and the inherent selfishness of human nature.
In this corporatist future, everything has a price, and everyone is trying to make a profit from absolutely every aspect of life. The air, water, friends, colleagues, and even significant others and spouses are all measured and judged by their monetary value. People even make money by trading on the value of each other’s futures. As one’s personal stock goes up, one may move up the corporate hierarchy; as one’s personal stock goes down, one may fall to lower levels of the corporation, or worse yet, find oneself of such little value alive that the corporation capitalizes the monetary value of their bodies through reclamation, that is by killing them and profiting from what little natural resources their physical bodies provide.
Each month, a select few persons who are guilty of disloyalty to the corporation are executed publicly - a spectacle that reminds employees to remain loyal while also bringing revenue from those who pay to watch.
Virtue is synonymous with that which brings profit to the corporation. Everything else is a vice. Of course, those who are born into the families of corporate executives have many advantages over everyone else and end up filling almost all of the executive positions, but the corporation makes sure that a few persons from the lower ranks make it up the corporate ladder to show those below that if they work extremely hard, they too might enjoy the life of the executive.
There is no government. There are no regulations. There are only corporations, and they use whatever means are necessary to maintain their power over the people in their ranks and over any rival corporations.
In this corporatist dystopia, we meet Charles Thatcher, a mid-level member of the Perceptions Management Team of Ackerman Brothers Securities, the most powerful corporation on earth. Perception is reality, and Ackerman puts significant effort into creating perceptions that will benefit the corporation.
In his work to craft favorable perceptions for Ackerman, Thatcher begins to see that the perceptions he is crafting on behalf of the corporation are far from the corrupt and violent reality in which he is living. His awakening is precipitated by a woman named Sarah Aisling, the daughter of an executive. Sarah was arrested for stealing rainwater, thus depriving Ackerman of profiting from the water. Thatcher chooses to write a report on Sarah’s crime of being a water thief, but as he learns more about Sarah and her friends who see themselves as citizens in a republic rather than merely colleagues in a corporation, he sees clearly that the corporate perceptions he was helping to craft were a big lie that supported a dehumanizing system that must be resisted. Thatcher comes to see that we are meant to be more than colleagues in a corporation; we are meant to be citizens, persons of equal value.
The novel follows Charles Thatcher on his dangerous but deeply personalizing journey from corporate colleague to free and responsible citizen. As we read this gripping novel of such a dystopian future, we could all breathe a sigh of relief that this is a fictional future, but it also confronts us with the sad and fiercely urgent reality that there is much too much in our present world that resembles the corporate dystopia that Nicholas Lamar Soutter describes in The Water Thief, and we all must make the choice of whether we will face our present and future challenges as corporate colleagues or as free and responsible citizens.
I’m Mark Davies for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2024 Spring Read.
