The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury - Introduction w/ Jesan Sorrells

Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand yet another business book on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting and analyzing the great books of the Western canon. You know, those books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in

high school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time to read, dissect, analyze and leverage insights from literature to execute leadership best practices in the confusing and chaotic postmodern world we all now inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western Civilization at the intersection of literature and leadership. Welcome to the Leadership Lessons from

the Great Books Podcast. Hello, my name is Hasan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast. Episode number

162 one of the responses, or one of the reactions to the perception of unrealistic expectations around social conformity is to adopt a pose, adopt a posture of existential cynicism.

Cynicism and existential cynicism in particular, influenced by French philosophical thought at the end of their national cultural experience In World War II, is a philosophy that proposes, quote individuals create their own meaning and purpose in a fundamentally meaningless universe and asserts that existence precedes

essence. As the 1950s wore on, many intellects and elites in the west, led around by the nose by writers like Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, gradually began infecting popular culture with a disease that began with a clinical, cynical posture towards stifling religious conformity and that would end with the deconstruction of almost every form of meaning down to

identity. At the end of the 20th century, our book, today a science fiction fix up novel, opens in a way that initially seems hopeful but then gradually descends into an existential confirmation of indeed a fundamentally meaningless universe. It also stands as a critique of militarism, the use of science, technology and post war prosperity, as well as a sidelong blow against the specter of the potential for mid 20th century global thermonuclear

warfare. It is a book, a collection of stories such as it were, that desperately wants the reader to care enough about the fate of the earth and indeed places other than the earth to save it, but also cynically presumes that selfishness, greed, vanity and existential dread leading to desperate failing action may be the last best outcome for humanity in the

end. Today, on this episode of the podcast, we will be introducing and discussing multiple themes from the second book by this Author that we have covered on this show, Ray Bradbury's the Martian Chronicles leaders. The era, the time for adopting a cynical pose of carefully cultivated disinterest and carefully cultivated insincerity has passed

here at the end of the fourth turning. The people, the teams, the organizations, even the families and communities you are leading are hungry desperately so for you to actually care. And so we open today with overview of the Martian Chronicles. So when you pick up this book, the copy we have is of course published by Simon and Schuster. And so because it is published by Simon and Schuster and the copyright is owned by them, we will not be reading very much directly from,

from the book today. However, when you pick up this copy, I have the unabridged version. You will see, you will note that the way this book is set up is written in a chronological form, starting in at least the version I have, starting in January 1999 and going to October 2026. And Ray Bradbury is very clever in this. He opens the. The book by framing the exploration, the. The act of going out into the stars. He begins to frame it as a. As a philosophical act going along

with this idea of existential dread that we opened with. He frames the scientific act of engaging with the technology of rockets and of fuel and of men and of machine, not as a scientific act, but as a philosophical one. And you can see that in the quote that opens up the Martian Chronicles. It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.

But of course, there's a cynical, dark tone underlying all of that. Now, the book opens in October, sorry not to remember January of 1999 with the idea of a quote unquote rocket summer.

As you go through the years in the stories, some of them are longer, some of them are shorter, some of them are written from the third person, some of them are written from the second person. But what you begin to see is that Bradbury is building an idea of a world. He's building the idea of a post war world where conformity and hope run into, at least in the first part of the book, run directly into the. The exegesis of going to

another planet. A different, if we're going to frame this in religious terms, a different eschatology, a new heaven, as one of the characters says in the book, leaving an old Earth. But of course, in going to that new heaven, we take with ourselves all of our old tendencies from Earth and we seek to create a new Earth that's remarkably like the old Earth in a

new or on a new heavenly body. Now, there are some challenges with this in the first third, maybe, or not even the first third first quarter of the Martian Chronicles, Bradbury Dwell delves into an idea that is compelling, I think, and we talked a little bit about it on the Stranger in the Strange land episode, both 160 and

161. You should go back and listen to those episodes. The introduction episode was 160 and then 161 is my my long conversation, 2 hours and 45 minutes, almost 3 hours with with John Hill, aka Small Mountain. Recommend listening to that. But in going through Stranger to Strange Land, Robert Heinlein picks up on the idea that Ray Bradbury proposes initially in Martian Chronicles. And I'll talk about the publication schedule of these stories in a moment here

after the first bump. But here he talks about or he picks up the idea that Bradbury initially proposes in these stories. And the idea is this. It is the core idea in the first quarter of the book. Mars is not uninhabited.

Mars is not a dead planet. There were or there are civilizations on Mars in Bradbury's conception, and those civilizations contain, for better or worse, what we would call entities. And these entities have their own conception of time. They have their own conception of space. They have their own conception of reality

and value. And of course, just as when Europeans journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean transcontinentally and showed up on the shores of the New World all the way back now, 600 years ago almost, and encountered Native Americans for the first time, the same encountering, the same sort of cycle of exploration, discovery, encountering something that is foreign and new happens when, when humans, specifically Americans, but humans, climb in their rockets and jet off to Mars, they discover that there is

a whole advanced society there, a whole advanced society of folks that are watching and waiting for them to land on their rockets, climb out of their rockets and go, well, go tromping around in their cities, in their culture, and even, even in their Martian canals. Sam so let's talk a little bit about the Martian Chronicles, a little more about the Martian Chronicles. Let's explore a little bit more about that. So this book was published in multiple parts and at different times.

It is what is known, according to Wikipedia, as a fix up novel. From the Wikipedia article about the Martian Chronicles, I quote, a fix up or fix up dash or no dash is the way you write that term is a novel created from several short fiction stories that may or may not have been initially related or previously published. The stories may be edited for consistency and sometimes New connecting material, such as a frame story or other interstitial narration is written for the new work. Close quote.

So how did Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451, which we've covered on the show, as I previously mentioned, the author of Something Wicked this Way, Comes the Illustrated man, and a number of other. A number of other classic science fiction and. And fantasy writings in the mid 20th century. How did Bradbury come up with the Martian Chronicles?

Well, according to what we were able to research, he was inspired by the work of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which is a book about a collection of stories about a man who returns to Widesburg, Ohio. The stories in the Martian Chronicles appeared in various formats throughout the 1940s and, and on into the 1960s.

Several of these stories that were included in this compiled book, this compiled edition, eventually wound up showing up on as radio shows, and eventually, I believe, a couple of them even wound up on the Ray Bradbury Theater, which premiered in the 1980s. Even from Wikipedia, one more time, and I quote, the Martian Chronicles was written as a chronicle. Each story presented as a chapter within an overall

chronological ordering of the plot. Overall, it can be viewed as three extended episodes or parts punctuated by two apocalyptic events. Events in the book's original edition range from 1999 to 2026. As 1999 approached in real life, the dates were advanced by 31 years in the 1997 edition.

Close quote. And that's the addition that we have on our show. On our show today, we have the 1997 edition where the dates be began in January 1999 with Rocket Summer and end with October 2026 and the million Year Picnic. Interestingly enough, we are recording this in 2025. So I suspect that future editions of the Martian Chronicles will start us off maybe in January 2030 and push us out into December or October

of 2055. And maybe by then in real life, maybe by then Elon or whoever will actually have figured out how the heck to get us to those Martian canals. So let's go back to the book, back to the Martian Chronicles. So I. I

want to pick up in June 2001. And the moon be still as bright in this one. In this story, in the first piece of the Martian Chronicles, we begin to explore the idea, the core idea that I'm going to talk about today for leaders, which is this idea of the impact of or the nature of the philosophy of existentialism. In the story, we meet a crew of folks who, who rocket off to Mars

from, from Earth. And inside this crew are Captain Wilder and Cherokee and Hathaway and Sam Parkhill and a man, a man named Spender and Spender specifically. Jeff Spender is a man who, well, who's a man who is out of place. He is out of place with his crew. Matter of fact, if we, if we looked at him through the lens of the social socio sexual hierarchy, that is, that is a term created by the gentleman Vox Day, who writes on Substack, we would say that Jeff

Spender is a classic Gamma in his crew. He's not an Alpha, he's definitely not a Sigma and he's surely not an obedient Delta or a Bravo. He is a. He is a guy who likes walls of text. He's a guy who is a king in his own mind. He's a guy who likes to be in control. And how is this replicated? How do we see this in the story? Well, Jeff Spender winds up wandering away from the Remain, from the, the larger group after they, after they set a fire and begin to begin to sort of explore the Martian

territory. A Martian territory that to them seems empty, where they can run around and christen things and they can, they can run around and drink and, and carouse and have a good time. Of course Spender doesn't want to carouse. Spender is falling in love with the Martian landscape. Matter of fact, he loves the Martian landscape more than he loves human beings. And he looks at their partying, views their partying as a sign of disrespect and disingenuousness.

Spender goes away for a week after threatening people and then returns and begins shooting the folks that are in the astronauts party. Of course, because he winds up shooting the humans. They then of course wind up hunting him through the Martian landscape and up a Martian mountain and, and the Captain towards the back end of the story has a, has a conversation with him. And it starts off like this at the top

of the mountain. Spender says, because I've seen what these Martians had, was just as good as anything we'll ever hope to have. They stopped where we should have stopped a hundred years ago. I've walked in their cities and I know these people and I'll be glad to call them my ancestors. They have a beautiful city there. The Captain nodded at one of several places. It's not that alone. Yes, their cities are good. They knew how to blend art into their living.

It's always been a thing apart for Americans. Art was something you kept in the crazy son's room upstairs. Art was something you took in Sunday doses mixed with religion, perhaps. Well, these Martians have art and religion and everything. You think they knew what it was all about, do you? For my money. And for that reason you started shooting people? When I was a kid, my folks took me to visit Mexico City. I'll always remember the way my father acted loud and

big. And my mother didn't like the people because they were dark and didn't wash enough. And my sister wouldn't talk to most of them. I was the only one, really. I was the only one who really liked it. And I could see my mother and father coming to Mars and acting the same way here. Anything that's strange is no good to the average American if it doesn't have Chicago plumbing. It's nonsense. The thought of that. Oh God, the thought of that. And then. Then the war. You heard the Congressional

speeches before we left. If things work out, they hope to establish three atomic research and atom bomb depots on Mars. That means Mars is finished. All this wonderful stuff is gone. How would you feel if a Martian vomited stale liquor on the White House floor? The captain said nothing, but listened. Spender continued, and then the other power interests coming up, the mineral men and the travel men. Do you remember what happened

to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? Spain.

A whole civilization destroyed by greedy righteous bigots. History will never forgive Cortez. You haven't acted ethically yourself today, observed the captain. What could I do argue with you? It's simply me against the whole crooked, grinding, greedy setup on Earth. They'll be flopping their filthy atom bombs up here fighting for bases to have wars. Isn't it enough they've ruined one planet without ruining another? Do they have to foul someone else's manger?

The simple minded windbags. When I got up here I felt I was not only free of their so called culture, I felt like I was free of their ethics and their customs. I'm out of their frame of reference. I thought. All I have to do is kill all you off and live my own life. Close quote. By the way, that's a classic gamma rant king in his own mind. But it's also the rant of someone who has fully and completely imbibed the horrors of mid 20th century existentialism.

One of the things you have to understand if you actually want to lead is you have to understand how to take complicated ideas and make them very, very simple for folks. And you have to understand a complicated thing. Well Enough to simplify it for people who can't follow the bouncing ball. So I'm going to try to make this as simple as I possibly can, because this is incredibly important. The Martian Chronicles is not just a science fiction fix

up novel. It's not just a collection of disparate stories barely hanging on together, bound together by two apocalyptic narrative threads. It's not just that. It's Ray Bradbury working out and talking about and introducing quite frankly to a conformist 19, mid 19, mid 1950s and mid 20th century American public. He's introducing ideas that would eventually wind up leading to the situation culturally and intellectually that we have now in the United States.

Now, Bradbury couldn't see that back then because at the time his biggest battle was the battle against what he perceived as religious stifling conformity. Matter of fact, the voice of Spender in that last piece that I read is the voice, I believe, of Ray Bradbury. The frustration with the suffocation of a conformist culture. A conformist culture that was about to borrow blow up in the 1960s and 1970s. And we could see this in the Martian Chronicles because it is a book

without. It's a book without a happy ending, similar to books that we've covered from the 20th century. On this podcast before. Ray Bradbury's the Martian Chronicles is similar in style and approach to or Or. It's the book example of the rant by the great Charlie Kaufman, played by Nicholas Cage in the movie

adaptation. And in that movie, Charlie Kaufman, again played by Nicholas Cage, goes to a screenwriting seminar held by the great Robert McKee, played by the inimitable who never mails it in, Brian Cox.

And Brian Cox stands on a stage and starts talking about how to, you know, write a screenplay, how to write a script, how to write anything, basically. And Charlie Kaufman is of course experiencing writer's block. And Charlie stands up and he, he has this great line, right, that he asks Mr. McKee, which of course sets up Mr. McKee for having a massive rant about the meaning of writing a rant that's quite frankly anti existentialist. The question that launches this rant is this,

what do you happen? Or what do you. How do you write a story where the writer is attempting to create something where nothing much happens, where people don't change, they don't have any epiphanies, they struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved? More a reflection of, quote, unquote, the real world. Kaufman asked this question and McKee of course responds by saying, why would I waste two hours of my precious time to observe the real world.

I come here to escape the real world. This is the tension that's evident in the Martian Chronicles. And one of the things that's imbued in it from the real world is this, this existential dread, this, this sense that there can't be any change, there can't be any epiphany. There is no meaning and nothing is resolved. The post war 1950s in America was a time of, in people's memory that was inflated in different kinds of ways, both by people who are temperamentally cynical and people

who are also temperamentally naive. The cynics, 80 years later look back at post war, the post war 1950s in America and they hold that the mid 20th century was a time of naive optimism, buoyed by military power and of course, enforced cultural conformity.

And of course, the naive, for their part, believe that the mid 20th century was a time, to paraphrase some, Garrison Keeler in that great NPR show, A Prairie Home Companion quote, where all the women were strong, all the men were good looking and all the children

were above average. But inside even A Prairie Home Companion lies existential dread, lies the idea that even though the women are good looking and the children are well behaved and above average, and even though the men are strong, that there's no meaning there. What can we get from that? What. What is the meaning behind that? And this is the same challenge that Charlie Kaufman is struggling with in Adaptation.

Made. Made in the early 2000s, right, the seeds of all that were planted in the 1950s by French existential philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and of course, Albert Camus. The horror of the success of French existentialist belief systems that captured elite thought and then drifted down into the masses in the 60s and 70s was that it eroded the foundation of spiritual belief in a transcendent reward in exchange for materialism,

commercialism and individualism in the here and now. And in that exchange, that exchange, of course led to nihilism and atheism. Or if not atheism, at the very minimum. Maybe not agreeing that God is dead, but sort of nodding along when the statement is made, we can't lay all this at the feet of Ray Bradbury. Of course, it's too much weight to put on the Martian Chronicles to carry all this, but it is.

The book does serve as an example of what existential dread can look like wrapped up in technological sophistication and cultural barbarity. SA Back to the book, back to The Martian Chronicles

by Ray Bradbury. So one of the more curious episodes or short stories or short pieces in this fix up novel from Bradbury that will set up my next point that I think is, is important for leaders to pay attention to is the story from June 2003 in the, in this edition, the 1997 edition that I have of the Martian Chronicles. And it is a story called Way in the Middle of the Air. And it was sort of one of the more surprising stories that I ran across here in the Martian Chronicles as a

reader of science fiction. It is a story about, well, it's a story about all of the black people, all of the African Americans getting their money together, getting a rocket, getting on the rocket and leaving Earth. Yeah, I kind of didn't expect this story dropped in the middle of this collection. And it,

it stands out because number one, it seems that it's Ray Bradbury's attempt to deal with segregation, deal with Jim Crow, deal with things he was reading about that were occurring in the south in the 1950s, and of course the attempts by, by folks like Martin Luther King Jr. And other civil rights activists to desegregate the South. But of course, it is a story written from a long way away and written, of course, with the tools that

Bradbury had at hand. Now, Bradbury was not a political commentator, nor was he a social commentator, but he could put politics and social commentary into his writings, as he already has demonstrated with Spender and with other stories here in this collection. But it jumps out most notably here in this story, Way in the Middle of the Air.

What jumps out to you also is the way in which the white people respond to or react to the as it's framed here, Steady river, just to quote here from just a second, the river flowed black between the buildings with a rustling creek and a constant whispering shuffle. It was a very quiet thing with a great certainty to it. No laughter, no wildness, just a steady decided and ceaseless flow. Teece sat on the edge of his hardwood chair. If one of em so much

as last, by Christ, I'll kill him. The men waited. The river passed quietly in the dreamful noon. Looks like you're gonna have to hoe your own turnip, Sam. Grandpa chuckled. I'm not bad at shootin white folks neither. Tease didn't look at Grandpa. Grandpa turned his head away and shut up his

mouth. And of course people, the people sitting on the porch, the men, the white men sitting on the porch, do attempt in particular Samuel Tees do attempt to stop the black people from leaving, as he says here, all over space jerked out of rockets like so many minnows hit by a meteor, by God. Space full of meters, you know that sure. Thickest buckshot powy shoot him down. Tin can rockets like so many ducks. So many clay pipes. Old

sardine cans full of black cod. Banging like a string of lady fingers. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. 10,000 dead here, 10,000 there. Floating in space, around and around Earth, ever and ever cold and way out. Lord, you hear that? You hear that? You there. The rage, right, of the white man being denied his quote, unquote, niggers who are getting in a rocket and going away. The river was broad

and continuous. Having entered all cotton shacks during the hour, having flooded all the valuables out, it was now carrying the clocks and the washboards, the silk bolts and curtain rods on down to some distant black sea. High tide passed. It was 2 o'. Clock. Low tide came. Soon the river was dried up. The town was silent. The dust settling in a film on the stores, the seated men, the tall hot trees. Silence. By the way, there's something also that's interesting in the story, Way

in the Middle of the Air. It kind of reminds you

in a way that I'm sure Bradbury intended because he was quite well read. He got all of his education out of libraries. It reminds you of the leaving of the Jews from Egypt and in the book of Exodus, a similar kind of stream of humanity leaving oppressors while they basically pay for the oppressed to leave. Bradbury

clearly liked this idea. And in this, in this story it sticks out because, well, most science fiction tends to, at least most American science fiction written during the mid 20th century, tends to ignore race, tends to set up a world where racial injustice, and we saw this on television in Star Trek, where racial injustice has just somehow faded away without any. Any details as to how exactly we got there. So what are we to take from that little piece from

way in the middle of the air? What are we to take from the river of black people leaving the south, getting on a rocket, and much like the Jews in the Exodus story, going to the promised land of Mars. By the way, there's another story, the. The other apocalyptic event that occurs.

A nuclear war. 20 years later, 22 years actually, after the black people leave the South, a nuclear war occurs. And Earth sends out a signal, asking or requesting or demanding that depending upon your perspective, that all the humans on Mars return home. And of course, all the humans on Mars dutifully do return home, only to die in an Atomic war again, more existential dread now capped with cynical irony, of course. In

my estimation. I wondered, did all the black people get on the rockets to go back or did they just stay on Mars? One of those unanswerable questions. But I like to imagine that they wouldn't have gotten back on the rockets because why would you want to go back home after 20 years? What would make you think that it would be better? Besides, you would have had 20 years to set up a civilization, right? You would have had 20 years to set up a Liberia on Mars. I'm sure it all

worked out anyway. That's that whole, like, cynical, like, lack of sincerity thing. I should actually say it probably did work out. I should probably say that I'm glad that they left. I should probably say that everything works out in the end. This is one of the challenges, one of the curses of our time. And I actually just sort of role modeled it there. I actually just sort of demonstrated it

there in my comments. The major curse in our time is that we can, we could spot actually, we're stunningly good at spotting hypocrisy in leaders and in institutions and in ideas. We're stunningly good at cynically pointing out that hypocrisy, sometimes even stunningly good at spotting it and pointing it out in ourselves. But we are less. We are less good. We are less able to actually be, actually exhibit the quality of sincerity.

Sincerity, for better or worse, is linked culturally and socially in America to the same cockeyed optimism that led American people to go west. Right? Go west, young man, go west. Right? And of course, it is linked to the cockeyed optimism that allowed people to, particularly white people, if we're going to be blunt about it, to accomplish the tenets of Manifest Destiny, right? Which in our benighted time. That's the second time I've used that term on this podcast today. In our bedided time, we

culturally deride. We deride Manifest Destiny. We deride cockeyed optimism. We look at that as a sign of naivete and of being a sucker. Culturally, Americans perceive a lack of ulterior motives in people and especially in leaders, and a lack of guile, a lack of deception seat as a sign of naive trust in the ability to be, quote, unquote, taken as if all of life were a massive confidence game and somehow we are all the marks.

But I think, and I take this from the Martian Chronicles, I think Bradbury desperately wanted to believe. So did Fox Mulder many years later on that great Horry show from the 1990s, the X Files. And Bradbury wanted to believe not just in Mars being full of Martians or in racial animus disappearing in interpersonal relationships in

America. He sincerely wanted to believe that sincerity, that cockeyed optimism itself, would somehow be rewarded by, in this material existence, and that we could get that reward without dread, without complication. And honestly, and this is probably the 1950s thing, without that much cultural effort. Oh, and of course, that we could get it without religion and without an appeal to a transcendent or higher form of meaning.

I think we can get to sincerity. I think we can achieve cockeyed optimism, but I do not think we can do that without belief, without faith in a transcendent God. So what are we to make of all of this? I've tossed a couple of ideas out at you. I've talked a little bit about existentialism. I've talked a little bit about nihilism.

I've talked a little bit about cultural sincerity at a leadership level. What are we to take from this? How are we to bring some ideas from the Martian Chronicles forward and really apply them in our own lived leadership lives in ways that actually make

sense? How are we to do that in 2025, one year away from, you know, the million year silence that, that Bradbury talks about or the Million Year Picnic, or one year away from the Million Year Picnic that Bradbury talks about or addresses in his book? Well, I think we have to have a return to the old strong gods.

I'm not talking about the pagan gods, right? I'm not talking about the pagan gods of Pan or Zeus or Jupiter or Athena or any of the Viking gods or any of the Hindu gods or any of the other nonsense. I'm not talking about a return to paganism. I, I think that way, that way lies more cultural barbarism just at scale with technological sophistication. I think we have to have a return to the old strong gods of sincerity. Sincerity is the quality of being free from pretense, deceit, or

hypocrisy. And in leadership, it is the antidote to the poison of cultured cynicism and even worse, deconstructionism that has annihilated the depth of meaning in America. We have to rebuild the foundations of meaning. I'm not the first person to say that we're in a meaning crisis. Matter of fact, I brought up that meaning crisis many times on this show. It's one of the reasons I do this show. I want to provide people with books that can point them to meaning.

Or books that can point them to what the forces are that are destroying or have destroyed meaning. But we have to rebuild. We have to stop deconstructing. We've deconstructed enough. We've deconstructed cynically and nihilistically and atheistically. And to what end? What exactly has it gotten us? The only thing left to do is to turn back to sincerity. Sincerity and traditions, sincerity and families,

sincerity and community. Sincerity and interpersonal relationships between you and your fellow man. One point that is worthwhile to make people do get confused on empathy is not the same as sincerity. Empathy is sold quite a bit in our culture these days.

It's the gloss that's put over everything, particularly the gloss that's put over, you know, approved positions or by the professional managerial class or the normies. Sincerity, I'm sorry, not sincerity, but empathy. Empathy is marketed to us, but not sincerity. Empathy, of course, is weaponized against conscientious people in order to manipulate those same conscientious people into supporting things that go against. Go directly against their

best interests. But sincerity, well, sincerity can only be mocked by the forces of nihilism or deconstructionism or cynical disinterest and dismissed. Of course, both empathy and sincerity are not the same thing. And we need to understand and recognize the difference between the two of them. Sincerity, of course, can't walk along by itself. It has to be accompanied by some friends and.