Some remarks

Notes added to the above by JOHOR, TAUFIQ, USSELL, and others

With so large an area of Shikasta due to be laid waste, one of our preoccupations was of course the preservation of adequate representative genetic material. This was partly accomplished by judicious and specific pressures on certain individuals and groups of individuals capable of putting personal concerns aside in the interests of the broad perspective. For when directed to certain places temporarily or comparatively "safe," this was not necessarily with the idea of their personal survival. Certain types of Shikastan were able to respond very well: in fact their capacity to respond made them eligible. But of course our difficulty was that admirable and useful traits were so mixed with the undesirable. Sirius and its colonies, Canopus and its colonies, Shammat - and others too - all were now in the inheritance of Shikasta. And the increasing pressure on the Shikastan stock from local and external radiation; from the increasingly poisoned and adapted atmosphere; from their sustenance itself, full of every sort of chemical and radiation, from, too, the sober knowledge deep within them of the responsibilities of their destiny: all this had the effect of adapting the genetic material even more, causing sports of all kinds. Some of these were - and are - valuable, with potential. But others, alas, not.

We shall mention, as an example, a particular hazard that was overcome by - very - long-term foresight and planning: this because it has formed part of the story in this volume, not because it was more or less important than others of our concerns.
It had long been foreseen that there would be a strong reaction against the white races, whose technology had ruined so much of the world, and so many of its people. There was a real danger that feelings would run so high that there would be a serious depletion of genetic material. The "white race" - or races - were of a very varied genetic mix. Some parts of the globe, even at the end, were still comparatively homogenous, still virtually unmixed: but the central and western areas of the central landmass, particularly the Northwest fringes, had absorbed such a number of different stocks, from other parts of Shikasta and from outside Shikasta, that it was undesirable this "race" should be lost. A great deal of effort, some of it apparently even bizarre, went into making sure that enough of these animals survived to carry on their genes into the future: these efforts were continuous and energetic everywhere over the northern hemisphere. Or almost everywhere: the Isolated Northern Continent, originally uniformly populated by a fairly homogenous genetic stock, indigenous, adapted to the surroundings, was supplanted by a conquering people, mostly from the Northwest fringes and the central landmass with nothing in the way of genes that was not already receiving our attention.
On the whole, the morale of the white "race" in the northern hemisphere did not assist our efforts. Their partial overrunning by the "yellow" races, their continuous and systematic starvation by the "coloured" races anterior to this conquest, out of the typically Shi-kastan (or Shammatan!) desire for revenge for past humiliations and deprivations, their slow acceptance of the rest of the globe's view of themselves, which caused a sharp painful readjustment and a relinquishing of assumption of superiority which had sustained them for centuries - all this lowered the tone, and stamina, in the Northwest fringes particularly, to the point where it was affecting not only their own will to live, but also the emanations from these areas: and good strong emanations were essential to our task of trying to prevent unnecessary suffering and bloodshed. The failure of morale swung so far that large numbers of - first of all - the youth, and then the older people, were unable to sustain in themselves any pride in their past at all. All they had accomplished in the way of technical advances, energetic experimentation in patterns of society, justice - fine in concept if not always a success in practice - these accomplishments of theirs seemed to them to be nothing at all, and they were tending to sink into abasement and sullen withdrawal. In fact, this emotional reaction, seeing themselves entirely as villains, the despoilers of the globe, a view reinforced every moment by a thousand exterior sources of propaganda, was as narrow and self-centred as their previous view - when they saw themselves as God-given benefactors of the rest of Shikasta. Both viewpoints failed to see things in interaction, a meshing of events, the reciprocation of needs, abilities, capacities. The "white races," subjugated, insulted, famished, deprived, with large masses of its population drawn off for cheap labour for the use of the reviving parts of the globe, with nothing of its wealth, and little of its culture left, was as unable to see itself as part of a whole as ever it had been. The Shikastan compartmentalism of mind reigned supreme, almost unchallenged - except by our servants and agents, continually at work trying to restore balances, and to heal these woeful defects of imaginative understanding.