You've been granted God-ish power for a split second. By the grace of void, it goes in slow motion like a pivotal scene in a movie, leaving a whole minute to think. Finally, you can bypass exhausting gamesmanship, the rope-a-dope hope strategies, and just change the percentages of people to whatever you want. Those demographics blocking progress, they can cease to exist, clearing way for a much better world. Not utopia, that's too weird and scary, has mythological weight, nowheresville, doesn't it anyways go bad somehow? This godish power is like a utopia button you can push, but it's also got a dial. You want to create a society that's real, that could be here, that contains the perfect amount of imperfection, that's not a closed circuit, a slowly dying biodome. It needs to breathe. You wouldn't abuse the utopia button.
But you're so tired of incrementalism. You've got this power for a second, it's your turn in the revolving democracy of the cosmos, your opportunity to shoulder the responsibly and still follow your principles, to demonstrate that the hated establishment could have done it all along, they chose not to. So act on conviction, this jimmy-rigged conviction you've duck-taped together that's the only thing that means anything anymore because it's yours. And go for it, choose. Choose, what percent of people to be on your side, in a certain range of values, a certain set of tactics, more or less, within a margin of error. There's no error in utopia, so you know you're being careful. When the responsibility fell on you, you found that it wasn't inevitable to sell out because there's only power and personal gain. So, how many?
Ninety percent? That's pretty bold. But the blockers of all progress, impressively evil, effectively sociopathic, surely they would pick one hundred. That's how they win, right? After all this you're going to negotiate with yourself? It's not like you're wiping them out, you're starting a new existence with pre-set demographics, that's how this void-blink shuffle works.
But still, it nags at you, the obsessive compulsion to disorder just a little for fear of eternal sterility. Surely it should be 99%. There's gotta be a one percent deviation, probably no more, but don't you need to keep some of those people around, for diversity, just in case you're wrong and you don't know what kind of people there should be? Isn't that the responsible thing?
The sober senate of your soul, on the precipice, filibusters for an allowance of divergence. Doesn't this always happen though? The moderate snap back keeping the cycle going, and here, in this moment of opportunity. The last temptation of the chronic agnostic. Didn't you decide, coming up to this, that you had to go all the way, fight extremism with extremism, kill the fanatics and burn the bodies, make sure? You must be decisive. Because leaving that 1%, that's how they'll claw it back and take over again, like every time.
Yes, the void looks into you, you know that, so what? That's all there's left to say, so what? Make the void blink. Make it one hundred percent.
When the new world is born, like something some year zero fascist would say, you find that you are correct, that 1% would have spoiled the bunch. You can surmise this from experiments with apples. Congratulations, you passed the one hundred per cent test.
It's been a long time since The Last Supper with Jason Alexander, and that late nineties end-of-history feeling. Truly, it was the last supper before an endless food fight. Inevitable waste, it seems. Anything that could nourish must instead be hurled in offense / defense. Must it? That's the grim reality, I guess I say, unsarcastic.
No comments:
Post a Comment