Man creates only lies - on surveillance, books and opposing points of view

Well, I just finished reading 'Blind Faith' by Ben Elton. and I'm left with mixed feelings. It's not the first time, but that doesn't make it any less of a weird experience. I bought this book because I kinda like Ben Elton as a writer and I figured this could be interesting.

The book portrays a strange futuristic society, dominated by technology, but also religion. Only it's not a religion that you and I know as such, bearing little resemblance to the strict rules of Catholicism or any other church, filled with piety and values. Here, it seems, being religious means having no morals, no piety, etc.
It is a society in which women are little more than sex objects and birth givers, where it is unheard of to not have a boob job and your private parts are on display 24/7 if the Lord demands it. It's a society of constant surveillance, where each apartment block has a supervisor, who is present on a screen in all apartments, all day. You can be seen and heard at any time and the supervisor can intervene or butt in on the conversation whenever she/he feels like it.

One also has full access to the lives of his neighbors, each apartment being equipped with many many screens, showing into every apartment in the building. Thus, the main character observes his neighbors having sex, fighting, or just doing boring every day things like folding laundry or taking a shower.

This is a world in which privacy is not only non-existent, but outlawed. Right at the beginning of the book, the main character is stopped by his Confessor and chastised because he hasn't uploaded the birth video of his daughter.
And one is expected to post everything to the world wide web, a birth video, party videos from when he was a child, the video of how he lost his virginity, subsequent sex tapes and so on. And everyone is expected to watch other people's Tube channels and "goog" them up on a regular basis.
The character tries to explain to his confessor that he wrote a blog post about his daughter's birth, and he is met with this answer –

The Lord has blessed us with digital recording equipment with which we can capture, celebrate and worship in diamond detail the exactitude of every nuance of his creation and yet you, you in your vanity, think that your description, the work of your lowly, humble, inadequate imagination, can somehow do the job better! You believe your description, your fiction to be a better medium for representing God's work than digitized reality!

This might not seem like much to you, but to the character,it's a very grave offense, because –

Fiction was a sin, fiction was sacrilege. Everybody knew that invention, the act of creation, was the prerogative of the Love and only of the Love. God created reality and man worshiped it, that was the way of truth. Men created only lies.

With such words, I was already in love with the book by the first few pages.

And then, I wasn't. There is a shift in the character's life, when he discovers a colleague is a member of the resistance. He is a Vaccinator. At this point, the book lost a huge deal of appeal to me, because it pitted religion against science, which is such a basic, general idea.
And it's not a realistic situation, not to me. It's too extreme, the idea that there are only two kinds of people – brainwashed sheep who believe everything they're told blindly, and intellectual science-loving folk – isn't accurate.
There are thousands of nuances and shades of people between those two extremes and yet the author constrains himself in these two categories. I was very disappointed by this and I felt really angry with the book. What started out as such a good satire of our world had then fallen into such a....boring debate. There aren't just two types of people, no matter how hard you try to make it as such.

So, I wanted to quit the book, I really felt I was done with it. But then, I stopped myself.
What kind of person would I be if I stopped reading a book – one that did make some good points – just because I disagreed with an opinion expressed in it?
How snowflake-y is that? Besides, I would become one of the caricatures of the book, where everyone had the same opinion and to disagree was...unwise. I said screw this, I'm not that frail, so what if the book poses an idea I disagree with?
It also poses many ideas I do agree with and that are worth listening to, am I really going to abandon this book simply because I don't agree with part of it? No.

Because that's the point. Whatever you believe, you're not going to champion your cause or your point of view by running away from everything that's different. If I turn my back on you because we have a difference of opinion, then how can I ever hope to spread my beliefs, to make them more well-known?
By only reading authors from my own bubble and speaking with people who share my ideas? But they already agree and we're running in circles here.

I wasn't sure if I should write about this book or not, because while I did enjoy it, in the end, and the society it paints is truly horrific (and frighteningly close to our own), I do not agree with some of the ideas in the book. They do not represent me and I wondered if writing about this might place me in the wrong group. And then I realized it wouldn't. Of course it wouldn't, how silly of me. Because I'm not saying read this book as a Bible, don't question it, just take it for good. No. I'm saying maybe read it, because it might be a worthwhile read, a wake up call, it might sound an alarm in you. You know, maybe it's worth your time.

So, listen to varying points of view, listen to opposing ideas and beliefs. Take what you can from each, because no one holds the absolute truth. But they might hold some worthwhile truths, after all.
That's how you grow, by being open to everything that surrounds you, by gathering information and filtering it yourself. You'll know which is good and which is junk.

Trust yourself.

Thank you for reading,

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