The Power of Information

Rachel Workentine

Daniel Clausen

ENGL 206: Essay 1

25 September 2015

The Power of Information

Tom Clancy speaks volumes about the role of information within a society containing an unequal partnership in his statement, “The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.”  Famous for his writings, specifically The Hunt for Red October, Clancy applies the idea of an information asymmetry to the military.  However, information asymmetries exist in many other factions; Octavia Butler explores one faction in his short story “Bloodchild.”  The science fiction story illuminates the negative affects well-meaning intentions can have when information asymmetries exists, as well as, intelligent life’s mastering of selfishness and manipulation through the relationship of a Terran boy, Gan, and his alien master, T’Gatoi.

Foremost, “Bloodchild” creates a new lens through which a reader looks at pregnancy, thus establishing the premise for the information to be disproportionately shared.  Terrans, “…fleeing from their home-world, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them…” discovered a new world, one with intelligent life that would prove to have superior information (Butler, 25).  Because the Terrans tried to colonize a planet with preexisting intelligent life, they unknowingly entered into a relationship with the native Tlic, in which the Tlic had an information asymmetry.  Whenever information is distributed unevenly between two individual societies of life, the society with the wider information base will assume an elitist personality, leaving the other society to become the lesser in the relationship.  Presumed from their flee from Earth, the Terrans hoped to find an environment where they could control the information asymmetry; despite how they had felt being the minor partner before.  What they found was not what they had hoped; Tlician society was the affluent form of intelligent life on the new plant.

Accordingly, a relationship between the Tlic and Terran cultures blossomed as soon as the Tlic saw they had something to gain from the Terrans and the superiority to take it.  The Tlic, having knowledge and intelligence on an echelon far higher than the Terrans, not only used their information asymmetry to successfully imprison the colonials but also to the degree the Terrans thought themselves independent.  Demonstrated by Gan’s comment, “[T’Gatoi] parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support.  Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people,” (Butler, 5).  Not only did he mistake his enslavement for independence, he believed the Tlic species to look out for their captives out of their own compassion.  The Tlic provided the Terrans with enough information to make them believe they were equal partners, each reliant on the other.  In actuality, the Terrans served as reputation builders Tlic and host bodies for their young.  They established the idea of equality to subdue the Terrans, so they could then be used without resisting the Tlician authority.