"Flat Country" is a cool book, but it was written more than 100 years ago. The author, Edwin Abbott, was a cool guy to come up with such a wonderful book. He was a British theologian, mathematician, classical writer and teacher of the British Prime Minister.
Shakespeare said, "Don't be upset, it's a vast world." "Yes, what the author is describing is a flat world beyond the three-dimensional world in which we humans live. There is no concept of "up" and "down" in the flat world, everything is in the same "plane".
The author is very considerate, afraid that we will not understand the concept of the flat country, and gave us an idea: you can find a table, crouch down, the line of sight is level with the table, do not pay attention to the "up" or "down" space, then you will find that no matter what shape you put on the table, from the perspective of the citizen of the flat country, the final line segment is seen.
In the world of flat countries, citizens are hierarchical according to their own body shape. The lowest laborers and soldiers were isosceles triangles, the middle class was equilateral triangles, and the professionals and gentlemen were square or pentagonal. From the hexagon onwards, it was an aristocratic class, and the more sides it had, the higher the status level. We all know that in geometry, polygons with more sides look closer to a circle, and yes, in flat countries, the highest ruling class is the circle.
Citizens of flat countries have a strict hierarchy. For example, the aristocratic class has the advantage of resources, and will have more visual discrimination than other classes in the way of discerning things, while the lower graphics will not have the opportunity to learn these methods.
There is also a kind of graphic that is more special, that is, the women in the flat country. They are needle-shaped, because the shape of the needle is at a certain angle in the plane, just a point, not easy to be seen, and the needle type is pointed at one end, which has a certain danger. Therefore, women are not allowed to go out casually, and the rooms they live in are also specially customized.
In the book, I saw some words that were not very friendly to women, but one of the passages described it like this: "To ensure the security of the country, we cannot rely mainly on legislation to restrict women's freedom, but on the protection of women's rights and interests." "At that time, I think that regardless of whether the author was biased against women or not, at least he was actually speaking up for women.
I think that some of the phenomena described by the author in the flat country are also a kind of innuendo of the real world. Different dimensional figures are like different types of humans. For example, two people with inconsistent cognitive degrees will have mutual incomprehension, and neither of them can understand each other's ideology. The author writes graphics of different dimensions, their perceptions and attitudes towards nature, the environment, and the law, and metaphorically describe the survival patterns of different groups of people in real society.
In the book, the dimensional world limits the way graphics live, but in real life, it can break the inherent pattern and establish a more harmonious living environment, so that women, men, the elderly, children, and all kinds of people with able-bodied disabilities can live in a way that does not harm others or be hurt.
The author sets the "I" in the book as a square in the flat country. Later, because this square had traveled to the three-dimensional country, he returned to the flat country to preach and preach, telling others that there was a "up and down, left and right" space world outside of us. As a result, he was convicted of rumor-mongering, and the book was written in the way he was imprisoned and reminisced about the past.
For this square, is there anything wrong with him in the pursuit of truth? If so, then his only fault is knowing too much.