"New People" (1979/1981)

Imagine that in front of you are four Lafferty levers: plot, character, madcap, and tempo. My favorite Lafferty story (not his best by far) is what he called his Collier’s Piece, the early "Saturday You Die" (1959)—an autobiographical account in the psychological sense: it captures what it must have felt like to be Lafferty as a child. I think it’s a story that opens a clear view into many of his extraordinary children and why he creates them. But I’m already getting off topic. Back to the levers. All four are set low on their scales in “Saturday You Die”: a steady plot, simple characters that are easy to keep up with, the wildness subdued, the tempo of a walk.

Then there are stories such as "The World as Will and Wallpaper" (1972/1973), where all the levers are thrown to their extremes: the plot proliferates in detail, the characters multiply, inventiveness buckles nearly every sentence, and the tempo is manic. The control set of The Reefs of Earth is closer to “Saturday You Die” than to “The World as Will and Wallpaper.” The Elliptical Grave goes the other way, every lever to its limit. “New People” is almost nothing like “The World as Will and Wallpaper” except that it shares some of the same calibration. It’s the skittering, manic installment among the Lafferty stories about Law of Intellectual Constancy (LIC). When Lafferty took to an idea like this, he would sound it out to the bottom.

So here in "New People" you will find a story world where beings have little control over how nootropic technology affects them. This contrasts with the situation in "I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows" (1976/1994) where nootropic-equivalent technology is democratized (also weaponized). For twelve years, mind- and strength-enhancing substances have been used to shape the New People’s world’s leaders. But the current year’s group of new people is different. (If you are tuned into Lafferty on this topic, it is clear the LIC will be involved.) The New are different because there are more of them, and as a group they are much smarter and stronger. They are also more than usually vulgar in the etymological sense. Lafferty will be playing with an equivocation on this. Vulgar as Everyman and vulgar as untutored taste.

As he often does, Lafferty gives us a large cast made up mostly of names, but there are memorable character sketches among the vulgar supermen. One is Lenny “Toadskin” Leim, a university freshman who can high-jump nine feet, nine inches. Then there is Sven Singleton, a kid with no special swing who breaks all throwing records but only asks, “How far must I throw it for a record today?” He knows there will always be tomorrow to beat it. There is also Bob Bunchy, a small guy who can out-lift the super-heavyweights, and Jimmy Joe Jimson, a football player who, after six games, still has not been tackled. But this group is different from the elites who came before. They are all slobs—though slobs who have almost all written a “meaningful and monumental work of philosophy.”

Lafferty gives you this cast before offering any explanation. The source of their powers turns out to be one Mother Maderos (her full name is Conchita Anita Maderos), and her chili powder. It is under investigation. Two characters then enter the story to represent the media and the government: an Investigative Reporter (IR) and his sidekick Clyde, a timid pansyish Federal Person (FP). At one point, Maderos answers the IR’s questions with folksy defiance. “I heard you said it, punk,” she tells him. “But I am not an exactly person. I am an approximately person.”

It turns out that her “Mother Maderos Dawn Chili Powder” contains no chili at all.

Instead, it is made entirely of additives, including live corn weevils, peyote cactus buds, psychedelic mushrooms, and “Bufotenine (Ah, Bufotenine!)” from toad skin. Being motherly, she also includes nitroglycerin because it “saves countless lives every day.” Then she adds two secret, code-named ingredients: one called “‘smart stuff root’” and the other, “‘strong stuff root.’” At this point, she is told she must stop selling the stuff. She puts two fingers in her mouth, whistles, and a low rumble signals that a train car full of her powder is already rolling off to safety.

Back to the young Übermenschen and Überfrauen. One of the year’s true intellectual giants is Terrance Tripuill, a geologist whose big oddity is carrying a bowling ball with a world map contoured on it. The ball’s three finger holes match up with three massive excavations he has started. He believes that ancient giants dug these 900-mile-deep holes to trap a colossal creature. “There is something waking up down at the bottom of that hole,” Terrance says. Whatever it is, it has brain waves a mile long, which he records. This is his “Big Study” material.

But there is another genius, Rafael “The Big Think” Ricardo. He calls this theory “the silliest thing I ever heard of.” Ricardo has a different kind of vision. From his “View From a Distant Mountain,” he claims that Earth itself is a bowling ball, thrown into orbit by a demiurge as a joke. An ancient civilization figured this out and filled in the finger holes with mountain rubble. That way, the demiurge “won’t be able to pick the bowling ball up out of its orbit,” and humanity gets a little more time.

See what I mean by the tempo? Now we switch to six Investigative Reporters gathered late one night over the walnuts and the wine. They complain about how crass the New People are. Tim Dall is the least respected of the group, but he suddenly becomes one of the übervolk, able to crack tough black walnuts between his thumb and forefinger. His colleagues, though, are disgusted by the new geniuses. Janus Funk says they are “the sort of folks who wear turtleneck sweaters and eat liver-and-onions.” The stylish Eileen Keeghan says the New People lack elegance. Maximilian Lombardy adds that they are so uncouth they would eat chili for breakfast. A light goes on for Tim. He jumps up and says, “That’s it! . . . Let’s all go have chili for breakfast. I believe that it’s important.”

And now we move toward the ending, which takes place at Crum Bums Junk Food Emporium. The six IRs order six bowls of Mother Maderos Dawn Chili. Their waitress warns them that the chili is not for everyone. “It makes you smart and it makes you strong,” she says, but it has downsides. She knows because she’s a New Person. These days, she accidentally breaks her husband’s ribs when they wrestle. As the reporters eat, they begin to feel the change. Roxie cries out, “Ow!… It’s as if long and pointed ears just came out of me.” The waitress tells them the chili is being pulled from the market by a government writ—what she calls “Compensating Fate intervening before things get clear out of hand.” She invites the reporters to join the “‘Committee of One Million to Keep it Quiet,’” a secret group of five million members who enjoy their powers in secret so they do not disturb society. The reporters agree. They accept that the chili’s joys are meant only for the right people—those who were already eating chili for breakfast. They wonder if anything will ever again be as “uniquely ‘new’” as it has been this year.

That is a lot of plot, and “New People” can feel a little exhausting, but it has grown on me over time. It holds an interesting place among Lafferty’s stories about the LIC, which is what I will focus on for the rest of this post.

The story’s main idea is the sudden, chaotic arrival of a universal, pre-existing potential. The “new people” are not mutants or superhumans in the usual sense. They represent the LIC—the idea that every person, from the crumbum to the nabob, carries a hidden capacity for brilliance, though Lafferty also includes physical strength. He shows no interest in standard science fiction themes of transformation. Instead, he presents another LIC thought experiment: what happens when people’s hidden intellectual and physical equality suddenly becomes visible—not entirely at random, since it shows up among the kind of self-selecting vulgarians who would eat chili for breakfast?

From there, the story presents its picture of what happens socially and politically when the LIC becomes a working but inadvertently self-selecting reality.

As in most of the LIC stories, some x-factor disrupts the budget of occult compensation. In this one, it is Mother Maderos’ Dawn Chili. Occult compensation was something that fascinated Lafferty. It refers to the hidden and often non-material ways—such as folk customs, religion, and craft—through which ordinary people show their genius. These forms usually go unnoticed because they do not challenge the existing social order. But the chili changes that. It dissolves the cultural and psychological barriers that kept this human potential hidden. By making this hidden power available for the price of a double cheeseburger, a soda, and a Milky Way at the Junk Food Emporium, Lafferty upends the system of compensation. The older, hidden paths are replaced with something open, measurable, and vulgar.

At the center of it all are the old elites, the IRs and the FPs, who are now forced to face the Law of Intellectual Constancy made visible. These are established figures who are horrified by the change. They despise the “new people” for being common and sloppy. By the end of this chaotic story, Lafferty has made his point clear. The old system of occult compensation was not built on true superiority. It depended on things like style, credentials, and appearances. The simplest way to put it is this: the old tools of control break down. They cannot function when the belief in human inequality is taken away.

One of the most Laffertyesque parts of the story is the state of the new world order. There isn’t one. Instead, we see how quickly revolutionary potential turns into something institutional. This is the anti-utopian punchline of “New People.” In the end, we get the “Committee of One Million to Keep It Quiet,” which shows that even when more human genius is unlocked, people do not tear down hierarchies. They build new ones—often even more exclusive. The committee’s stated goal is just what you’d expect: to enjoy their power “without upsetting the money cart or the academic wagon.” Is that cynical? Maybe.But the whole story turns on two of Lafferty’s idées fixes: first, faith in the hidden extraordinariness of the “common” person; and second, the certainty that anything greenly revolutionary will be captured by the ancient urge to erect a new ruling or managerial class.

Then again, it isn't so bad if you're the smart ype who knows this whole thing works:

“I give it up!” Eileen spat in disgust. “I was always smart enough, and I refuse to become gross. I'll blow the lid off this thing!” And she rattled out of Crum Bums North-Side place angrily (she always wore a lot of wooden bracelets and anklets; they accounted for the rattling). “She wouldn't even know where to find the lid,” the waitress laughed, “but she'll probably create a few hot pellets. I read her column ‘Kit Fox Droppings’ in the paper. Ah, we have a sort of organization to keep things in hand. We call it the ‘Committee of One Million to Keep it Quiet,’ though it has about five million members now. You all may as well join. The idea is—” “—that it's fun to be super-smart and super-strong,” Roxie took it up, “but it's the most fun when you keep it quiet and enjoy it privately without upsetting the money cart or the academic wagon.” “That's it,” the waitress said. “You all may as well have a couple more bowls. The fun of this is that the joys can only come to the right people, those who ate chili for breakfast anyhow. Giving up Dawn Chili doesn't mean that we will be giving up chili.”

New People Notes.pdf

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