One of my favorite books is a novel called ‘Hard to Be a God’ by Arcady and Boris
Strugatskiy. It describes a distant future. The human race discovered space
and found a lot of inhabited planets. One of them is inhibited by people with
technical, intellectual and mental levels about the same as Earth'sMiddle Ages. The
nobeles there are cruel, arrogant, greedy and thoughtless. They force peasants
to serve, they humiliate and kill intellectuals for religious reasons. The
earthmen are worried and sad about it but they understand they can’t do
anything. If they had brought more food to that planet then the nobles would
have captured all of the goods. If they kill nobles then the most
powerful humble would have become nobles and continue to force others. If they
controll everyone to protect people they would have stopped the
evolution of that civilization. The disputable conclusion of the novel is that it is
not possible to make people’s civilization intellectual and progressive from
outside. The people should grow themselves - it is a hard, cruel process with
lots of victims, but if you force people to live perfectly they will be perfect
slaves but they will not grow their human qualities. The novel suggests the
communist idea ‘Force humanity to perfect word’ and criticizes it subtly.
However, a lot of readers disagree with such point of view and think that
‘laissez-faire policy’ shown by novel authors is a mistaken choice. I think
the authors do not give a single correct answer and just indicate ethical
problems. The book is very popular in Russia (I think it is comparable to
‘Strange in a stranger word’ in the US) and it has several movie adaptations but
for me no one film is as good as the original novel.