badeni’s fears about the spread of literacy can be likened to today’s struggles with the ruling class's interest in cutting funding to education. and orb has always been less a series about heliocentrism itself, but more about truth and its relationship to power.
in its setting (which is over-dramatized but fundamentally accurate), knowledge is both a means of control and a means of liberation. and one of orb's central questions remains the same: who controls knowledge?
and of course, it is the elite who control knowledge and information, and rather than creating stability, it breeds terror and oppression. the church wages a holy war against intellectuals, women are stripped of autonomy,
and scientists are forced to rediscover the same truths over and over because shared knowledge is forbidden. that badeni himself doesn’t champion the democratization of information will perhaps be his downfall. his desire for knowledge and his need to be its sole possessor.
because the series itself disagrees with badeni—progress only happens because knowledge is passed down, not because of individual brilliance, but collective effort. we see this in how the series literally periodically changes protagonists over generations to showcase this.
returning to the central theme of truth and its relation to power, the ruling class doesn’t actually care about truth. they care about control. that’s why they torture “heretics”.
not because it’s a reliable method of extracting information (it isn’t), but because it spreads terror. the point is not to find the truth but to make heresy itself synonymous with punishment. to stifle dissent, to make sure people don't think different out of fear of torture.
and systems of oppression don’t sustain themselves through overt monstrosity, but through the normalization of monstrosity. nowak is ordinary. he is not uniquely cruel. he doesn’t see himself as a monster, he doesn’t revel in the suffering he causes.
he simply believes he is doing what is necessary. and when oppression is baked into ordinary men, when cruelty becomes as routine as any other job, rebellion doesn’t need to be crushed—it simply never begins.
when the system’s logic becomes the people’s logic, when fear is so deeply ingrained that questioning authority feels unnatural, dissent dies before it can take root. that's what the elite, what those in power, what the ruling class wants. to not even be questioned.
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