This world of imagination is the world of eternity. – William Blake
In a place that is not a place as material beings understand the term, on a plane of existence several levels above our own, three friends came together to share stories of their travels since the last time they had met. I shall refer to them as Red, Green and Blue, but what they actually call themselves (if indeed they use a concept as crude as “name”) I do not know. As was their custom they eventually lapsed into a philosophical discussion, debating various ideas in much the same way as sentient beings everywhere in the multiverse do, and one of the topics they touched upon was the ephemeral nature of the societies created by material beings. Soon the conversation turned to a comparison of these societies, and they began to speculate about which of these had the lowest likelihood of still existing in a recognizable form by the time they got around to visiting it again.
“I visited a world whose inhabitants were expending its resources at a shocking rate,” ventured Red. “They had developed technological means of improving their physical conditions, but made not the slightest effort to calculate the probable supply of the raw materials consumed in the process, nor even the most basic contingency plans for the eventual depletion of those materials. Though enough of them were skilled in the development and use of technology to maintain and even improve their control over their environment, the majority of the population was fixated on an irrational belief system which pretended that beings from higher planes like ourselves had nothing better to do than to watch over them constantly, protecting them from the consequences of their own foolish actions. Though they believed such beings could transcend the laws of nature and violate conservation of energy, they simultaneously imagined that the beings were obsessed with the tiniest details of their behavior, and would dole out reward or punishment based upon how closely each individual could adhere to a set of arbitrary, pointless and mutually contradictory rules. So rather than prepare themselves for the ultimate necessity of modifying their procedures to maintain or improve their current standards of living, they instead devoted tremendous effort to asking nonexistent benefactors to somehow materialize favorable consequences for them, and to spying on each other to ensure nobody was breaking any of the silly rules which they imagined their incorporeal benefactors to care about above all else.
“Surely, such a misguided sense of priorities must eventually result in catastrophe; if they fail to think ahead they must eventually reach a point where their resources run out, and when that happens their society must either collapse or decline into barbarism.”
“That is indeed a sorry situation,” replied Green, “but I think we must all agree that whatever the chances of such a civilization’s survival, they would be lower still if those hapless creatures were burdened with even more deficiencies. I visited a world very like the one you just described, but in addition to the resource depletion, irrational belief system and refusal to face reality, they were also incredibly violent. A large fraction of their already-limited means was expended in the infliction of harm upon one another, and when they could find no sensible reason to do so they invented ridiculous ones. Like the beings you visited, they were obsessed with monitoring each others’ mindless obedience to foolish regulations, but they further believed that they had the right to inflict violence upon each other for even the smallest and most inconsequential violations of those regulations. They even selected from among their number a designated group whose entire purpose was to go about not only looking for rule-breaking, but to actually deceive their fellows into breaking rules so as to provide an excuse for the infliction of violence. Nor was this violence limited by some principle of proportionality; these special agents were allowed to inflict grievous, even fatal harm upon their victims for even the tiniest transgression of the most obscure rule. And when they could not discover a large enough number of rule-breakers to satisfy their assigned quotas, they would simply pick victims at random, falsely accuse them and inflict harm just as though they had actually done whatever it was they were accused of.”
“Incredible!” rejoined Red.
“There’s more. Though there were already so many rules it was totally impossible for any of them to ever learn them all, they designated another group whose entire function was to invent even more of them, and to ensure they were too complicated for the ordinary individual to understand; they were written in a form of code so that none without special training could even hope to comprehend them. And if these rule-makers failed to make enough new rules to satisfy certain other individuals, they were criticized for inefficiency.
“It seems inconceivable that such a civilization could even last long enough to run out of resources; surely they must destroy themselves well before that point.”
But then it was Blue’s turn. “I fear that the world I visited must come to a bad end even more quickly still, for its inhabitants were afflicted by all of the behavioral flaws the two of you have described, and another which I consider still worse. Like many material life-forms, they reproduced sexually and the biological drive to mate was a strong one. But though the act of reproductive union was so pleasant to them that they would use every opportunity to engage in it, even when biological conditions did not allow impregnation, they simultaneously believed that the act rendered them ritually impure. A very large fraction of their arbitrary rules were dedicated to restricting the act of mating, and infractions of these rules were held to be among the most serious of all, and subject to some of the harshest penalties in the society. Furthermore, mated pairs were supposed to be exclusive despite the fact that one of the biological sexes tended to have a much stronger and less selective drive than the other, and though transgressions against that exclusivity were extremely common they all pretended that their own mates would never behave so. An entire profession was dedicated to allowing the expenditure of such urges in a controlled fashion so as to reduce the potential harm resulting from transgressive mating; without this profession the long-term pair-bonding upon which their entire social structure was built would undoubtedly fail far more often than it did. Yet those who practiced it were vilified and stigmatized by most of their societies, even by those who used their services, and the dedicated rule-enforcers spent wildly disproportionate amounts of time and effort in their persecution. Furthermore, they seemed to labor under the delusion that if they could only cage everyone they discovered in this transaction, the biological basis for it would vanish without affecting their rate of population replacement.
“Given that such a large fraction of their racial energies was expended upon a wholly futile task which, if they could somehow succeed at it, would totally destroy the foundations of their society, I cannot believe that this culture still exists in the form I perceived it. Such mass derangement must surely prove disastrous within a relatively small number of generations.”
The friends agreed that the world Blue had visited must indeed have fallen into chaos by now, and was therefore the worst of all those they had seen. Perhaps they were wrong; it may be that as astral entities they had an imperfect understanding of the tenacity and adaptability of material life. Or perhaps the time-scale on which they functioned was so protracted that nearly any society of material beings would perish quickly by their standards; it may be that “soon” to them would be twice ten thousand years by the way we measure time. Conversely, it may be that my poor, ephemeral brain of matter was unable to grasp the true nature of their conversation, and that upon awakening from this vision I filled in the gaps with my own mortal preoccupations. And really, in all likelihood, Red, Green and Blue exist only in my imagination (and now in yours), and this entire tale is but the idle fancy of a tired and cynical mind.
We’d better hope so, anyway.
An excellent story. You certainly have a great skill in writing.
I just knew humanity wouldn’t come out of it well…
… not my favorite. Like you skipped the fable, jumping straight to the moral.
Anyway, where did you get the art?
I may be wrong, but the first picture reminds me of a snapshot from the beginning of Doctor Who in the early 80’s during the last year or so of Tom Baker’s reign and then during Peter Davison’s…
They can’t all be masterpieces; even Shakespeare had off-days. 😉
I found the pictures via Google image searches; if you want to know what the second one is, click on it and look at the file name.
At this time of year, by which I mainly mean the government “holiday” when we decide to change all the clocks (probably at the behest of the coffee industry), rather than Lent, I often think, really that the thing that separates humans from everything else I know about, is the constant fighting against nature. I have friends all over the world, mainly in Asia, and they think this change of the clocks is decidedly odd.
Your story makes me think of the old Socratic dialogues, in which we have a discussion to get at the root of the matter. (Although, I confess it also reminded me that Red keeps leaving my main television set, leaving only Blue and Green behind… I’m going to need to fix that one of these days.)
Years ago I watched a movie based on some Kurt Vonnegut story. In the movie some aliens went to a pornographic movie. On the screen, a family was eating a large meal. At one point, in their depravity, they even allowed their family dog to eat at the table. Scandalous! (Needless to say, there was no sex in this film, as the biological drive these aliens were ashamed of was the need to ingest food and drink.)
That sounds super cool.
Slaughterhouse-Five?
No, but Slaughterhouse 5 did have a cool seen where Billy Pilgrim ends up in an alien zoo with an attractive young woman. I also don’t think it was Welcome to the Monkey House. I wish I could remember.
I believe it’s Breakfast of Champions then. I read the book, but haven’t seen the movie. A good movie from a Vonnegut story is Mother Night. If you haven’t read the book/watched the movie, Nick Nolte plays Howard W. Campbell Jr., and the movie is him writing his memoirs while in jail awaiting trial for war crimes during WWII.
Nice change of pace story. Which reminds me—on the new Cosmos, there’s a scene where Neil deGrasse Tyson shows a vision of what Earth might look like 250 million years from now. The continents have moved, but you can still see the bright lights of cities at night, so some intelligent species—persumedly homo sapiens—is living there.
I just can’t imagine human beings lasting that long. I don’t think that necessarily means that we are going to fight a nuclear war, but human society has a big Achilles’ heel which you touch on briefly in this story. Most of mankind is dependent on a small group of people who grow their food and produce the energy and resources they need on an everyday basis to live. It takes hard work and training to acquire the skills needed to use the technology that keeps everybody alive—and I’m also not talking about the skills needed to KEEP that technology running.
When the Black Death killed a significant fraction of the people of Europe (one-third? one half?), it didn’t take that much skill for the survivors to take up the plow and grow the food needed for themselves and later future generations to survive. If something were to happen to either knock out a similar fraction of people in the first world by disease or war, or worse, if something were to permanently disable the technology we use—like an EMP burst—will the large number of people who earn their bread by driving to work in their SUVs to work in a cubicle, or even the lowly peons who make a living in Starbucks, McDonald’s, or WalMart—suddenly be able to grow their own food if everything is brought down to Amish level technology? I think a lot of people are going to die in that case, and there is no counting that the human race will avoid extinction. Civilization as we know it, in any rate, will end and English will go the way of Latin as the first truly world-wide global language will evolve into multiple unintelligible language. After several generations, people who live in what is now known as Canada, America, and Great Britain will need translators to speak to each other as people in France, Spain, and Italy do today.
With that little thought, I think I’d better take a shower and get some milk from the store. Talk to you later!
I am almost completely certain that it 250 million years there will be intelligent life decedent from humans, and equally certain that the life forms will be some combination of humans and technology. The singularity will have come and gone a long time before, and will have begun it’s own process of evolution.
Here’s something to consider. For thousands of years, humans just went from place to place hunting and gathering. It was only when our ancestors in the Fertile Crescent stumbled onto the right types of vegetation that the beginning of agriculture began to occur. The type of wheat that we take for granted was not a “normal” stalk, but a freak mutant that humans selected and grow for our benefit. (This is what Maggie is talking about when she says that humans have genetically modified food from the beginning of agriculture.) What if those right types of foods don’t exist, or the necessity that brings about agriculture never occurs? I don’t think it is a given that the descendants of humans are still on this earth but are forced back to a pre-agricultural existance, that they will evolve into a highly intelligible life form that can not only contemplate leaving the Earth, but actually do it.
I’m not too worried about resources. The most problematic resources are those having to do with energy … specifically fossil fuels … there is a finite amount of those but new technology (like fracking) has greatly expanded our options and will permit us to use those fuels for a lot longer in the future.
And we … DO … have nuclear power … the cleanest and most efficient form of energy but too many idiots are afraid of it. It will be used though – once other options are expired and people’s quality of life starts to decline. They say … “fuck fear – bring on the neutrons!” once their houses start to get cold.
And really – we are only one great discovery away from making solar a viable option. It is NOT a viable option now though.
I don’t think we’ll consume the planet up.
But …
The great threat is weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear proliferation was a given from the moment the Hiroshima bomb dropped – and now we have religious idiots making them. It’s a deadly combination.
Expect nukes to become smaller and more powerful.
Given that simply the destruction of the two twin towers and a plane crashing into the Pentagon – brought our economy to it’s knees on 9-11 … two or three nukes detonated (maybe even just one) … will throw this nation into chaos. It would likely do the same for any nation – save perhaps, an expansive and authoritarian one like China.
The real threat is that we will destroy ourselves first.
It always sort of irritated me that all beings on a “higher plane” were always superior rather than a far more likely alien. The idea that something inherently incomprehensible is simultaneously comprehensively superior is ludicrous.
I get the criticism, but I’m having trouble finding the part of the story where I said the aliens were “superior”. Longer-lived and non-corporeal do not translate into “superior” in my book. And this sentence:
…does not seem to me to indicate perfect or even very superior entities.
This may just be the old misunderstanding that beings in a more advanced or abstract settings are themselves superior, like members of modern civilization feeling superior to cavemen. The thing is, if you take away education and the trappings of civilization, genetically cavemen are actually superior because of more selection pressure. And I doubt there is much of a difference mentally. Just look at what stupidity and atrocities so-called modern human beings are capable of.
As humankind developed there was a dangerous design fault – speech as the only means of communication. The result is constant misunderstandings between individuals, let alone nations. It will cause our demise eventually I’m certain.
Speech isn’t the only means of communication we use.
Heh, there is much truth in fiction, even heavy-handed moralistic fiction.
@Stormdaughter: “I am almost completely certain that (in) 250 million years there will be intelligent life decedent from humans . . . ”
So you’re saying that there is hope yet for intelligent life to emerge on the earth? That’s encouraging, even if the time frame isn’t.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. – blake
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