Politics

(This chapter follows "A Window to Gerunda". We are on Planet Gerunda, inside Lira System. Know as Mystery System by most the humanity. The year is somewhen around 2100 of Expansion. Little more than 1.000 years After the Fall. Lira System is isolated from the rest of the galaxy, and people here do not know for sure whether or not there are still humanity beyond this stellar system.

From the calendar we are used to, sometimes mentioned as "Old Calendar" it is more or less the years 5100. Since we are at 2025 when I write this. Baby Steps Age will start some decades from now, by the end of this century. And it lasts something between 800 and 900 years. Followed immediately by Expansion Age. )

My preference was to go to a safe-house, in the protective custody of Federal Police, or to a military village. Both options would grant me the additional protection of anonymity. I had already lost all physical things of sentimental value I had accumulated during life, in that explosion. It was a message, ratter to my employer than to me. I wasn’t looking for any additional note reiterating the same point.

Which was that someone didn’t liked the changes in urban administration recently made by our Hermetic Senate.

I am no politician, I only follow the decisions made by those who are. Unfortunately for me those with the power to make unpopular decisions are too well protected. And those who which to manifest their displeasure about those things do not always pay attention to the distinction between player and pawn.

Well, I took the job, knowing the risks.

My boss decided to send me to a master suite in the Excentric. A night in a place like that costs half a year of my salary, but I am not paying. This is the best hotel in the country. Their security as been good enough for chiefs of State, Princes, even to Litmus Fleet captains. Has to be good enough to me.

That is the way our govern sends its own message. Which is that they will not bend to intimidation by terrorism. They will not hide.

I am in this occasion a figure of speech. My face is representing our State itself, or laws and principles. Of course, if anything goes wrong they will replace my dead corpse by some other public servant and keep the conversation going. The State itself is not likely to be exploded by a terrorist bomb. Still, it’s quite an honour to be in that position I am now. Sort of. Needing to take **** to be able to sleep every night instead of expend the entire night jumping at any real or imaginary noise.

People cannot do much for each other without personal involvement. What always involve a great deal of personal risk.

On the same time, there is no worse lie than “social responsibility of companies”.

Business enterprises can barely ever obey the law, when the risk of disobeying it does not exceeds the reward, in the foreseeable future. ONGs are a scheme, a sort of fraud. They always have been. And that is fine.

Self-interest has great merits, and the most relevant among those merits is the merit of being authentic in itself.

Of course, by itself pure self-interest results in such extremes of dystopia for vas majority of people, that classic communism is the fair and proportional answer. I mean the sort of communism that killed the royal family in Russia, and expropriated practically all means of production from their lawful owners. And (arguably) was still the same kind of communism when, a little later, under Stalin, it killed more non-combatants than Hitler Administration in Germany. All that said, this communism is still the only possible, and fair, answer for pure Liberal Capitalism.

The same would have happened in the British Empire and everywhere else under it’s industrial shadow. If the British decision makers didn’t had better sense than the economic liberalists in our beloved colony.

After such a long time one would imagine humanity should have progressed beyond such evident mistakes. But we have not progressed one inch.

Was not too hard to notice the selling argument of communism was true, in the XIX century of the Old Callendar. “Working Classes of the World rebel!! You have nothing to lose, except your chains!!”. To prevent the fall, and keep the world as they liked it, all those well born British needed to do was to make that true false.

Not in the realm of word!! Mind you. Propaganda is great, but has limits.

Lies such as “social responsibility” don’t cut here.

The cost for those British would be higher. What they needed was to actually make life better for the vast majority of people in society. “The losers”, as the Yankees back in those Pre Baby Steps years called us.

Give those people something dear to risk losing if they rebel. Something meaningful, something present in daily bases.

The Welfare Capitalism was born that way. With it the Welfare State.

Ever since, it never lost a fight against communism!

Is true: it almost never last long.

However, all the time, are the Liberal Doctrine true believers the ones responsible for bring it down. Not any flavour of communism.

Is a game where Scissors beats Paper, Rock beats Scissors, Paper beats Rock.

Welfare State cannot stand ground against Liberal Doctrine. As soon as the blood is washed away from the streets it is washed away from memory. Revolution stops feeling like a immediate concern in the minds of economic and intellectual elites. Ergo, the costs of Welfare State became unbearable for them.

Those are really high costs, unless you have in mind the alternative.

That brings Minimalistic State back. Recreating the XIX century England. What recreates Russian Revolution. So, the cycle may start again.

Even biological immortality could neither stop this cycle provide alternative to it. During those 8 or 9 centuries when humanity was made (practically without exception) of biologically immortal individuals. Still, those immortals kept repeating this morbid paradigm. Unable to learn from it.

I would not be writing this just to say there is no alternative. I only do that because there is one.

The alternative exists. It is actually far older than Industrial Capitalism itself. Even older than Hellenistic Democracy, Athenian Fashion. You cannot improvise something like that. I am, of course, talking about Theocratic State.

If ONGs are a lie, there is no true more solid than churches.

All you need to stop the destructive impulses of liberal capitalists and communists is to ground your Welfare State Capitalism on solid holly ground. Sacred Rituals. Spiritual Faith.

Makes no difference what your religion looks like, provide it has a strong backbone. And the hearts of vast majority of your people.

Must be ONE religion! Not two, three or more. It must be the faith in the hearths and minds of large majority of your population. Not just at the bottom of social pyramid. Not just at the top. All the way, from bottom to top.

That brings us to the end of this long Historical walk. Back to here and to now.

When our ancestors build the previous incarnation of this nation, as a floating city. Improvised from wreckage of fallen inter-stellar ships. To stay under the light of Lira. Since staying under that light was the only way they had to stay safe from the shadows. Our ancestors had no religion.

About 92% of them self-declared atheists. The remaining 8% followed a vast and confuse portfolio of philosophies.

For the 75 years of Heliopolis Age. And the 35 years that took them to find this island and move here for good. Our ancestors remained too distracted by the immediate survival problems at hand to turn that cycle on. Nevertheless, they were prisoners of that cycle still.

Was a matter of time for the wheel to regain its implacable movement.

As soon as the first mages proved their power was real. By presenting the alien natives of Lira System to humanity. The danger represented by the shadows to humanity became just one more factor to be administrated. That gave the wheel freedom to start moving again.

The fae do not intervene in human business at that level.

Vampires and Mecha-Lords are, by their own nature, external to those matters also.

The first group is Absolutist to the core. While the second can be described either as Absolutist or as Feudalist, depending on your point of reference. Neither has much use for our economic doctrines.

Human society; properly speaking, human, human society; has the natural impulse for imitation. It tried to imitate both models. Both imitation failed. Because we are, for good and for bad, only humans.

The tragedy of bloody revolutions and dystopic super-exploration of misery continued among our ancestors, as it still continues in the continents of Gerunda. Dystopian Capitalism, Brutal Communism, rest, start again. In the long run it will end up costing us more lives than the shadows and the vampires combined.

That’s why our ancestors, only few generations ago, decided to join effort, and came up with a definitive solution.

The only emergency exit from the tragic cycle is theocracy.

Usually to get yourself a theocracy you must first have a religion. Since they had no religion to use as base for their theocracy, they did what pragmatic people do when they lack a essential ingredient for a recipe they want to cook.

Our ancestors improvised.

I know, I just told you one cannot improvise that sort of thing. Sue me!

Humans cannot base their society in imitation of vampires or mecha-lords. Because neither of those groups is actually human.

Unlike mages. Who are as human as you and me.

Since we didn’t had enough faith to move a sand castle, let alone a mountain, we used fact instead. The facts from Astral Plane, documented and provided to us by mages.

That’s how the first (and up to this day only) Magecracy was born on Planet Gerunda.

Every public aspect of our society is determined by Cabal Politics.

By choosing that path we expose ourselves to constant transformations. Those who proposed the idea did not realized how radical that would be. Because mages live most their lives in the Astral plane, when the rest of society is sleeping. They have on average 13 entire days for each night. Since they experience time faster. And those are 13 days without sleeping, eating, taking care of physiological needs or needing to rest from physical exhaustion. They need to “rest” from a sort of mental exhaustion from time to time, but that is done by changing activity, not exactly by resting. One do not stay still in the Astral Plane, apparently.

Mage society in the Astral Plane moves faster than ours. Their minds mature fast too.

Every morning you see a mage that you saw in the day before, he didn’t saw you for 13 days, at very least. So, you can imagine what happens when all the Legislators in the country are mages.

On the other hand, by trusting our politics to our mages we guarantee a privileged position in Gerunda Geopolitics. Our mage community attracts talented mages from everywhere.

Our techno-magical expertise reaches far beyond what a small nation like ours had any right to hope for. We have turned ourselves in a major global power in that aspect.

Techo-magic has grat advantages over normal technology. It suffers one important limitation: is impossible to apply industrial scale to it. Every piece of techno-magic requires personal attention from individual mages to be made. There are no self-replicating technomagic factories, no assembling lines.

Another disadvantage of techno-magic is how ephemeral it is. The magic in it disappears in a matter of hours. Unless the mages put some vampire blood in the mix. With vampire blood, techno-magic lasts forever. Or so close to forever that makes no difference.

Our nation therefore is **** to buy huge volumes of vampire blood. Our vampires cannot supply the needs of our industry. Other nations consider that commerce illegal.

They get the blood they need from their vampires by contract, like you would expect, but they do not call it commerce. And exportation is out of table.

As you imagine, it is a constant source of conflict between our nation and most other countries on Gerunda. Nothing can be done to prevent that conflict, but so far it has been contained in diplomatic circles and economic forums.

We have the best techno-magical defences. Our magic products are attractive enough to limit the movement to isolate us from global commerce. We are fine.

I mean, someone exploded my apartment less than 3 days ago. Ergo, “fine” in this context is relative.

I was told there is still the possibility of that “action” (said someone who had his home intact) being the product of some foreigner nation. Expressing disapproval about our “Illegal and immoral Blood Trade”. Could be a govern, or a organization non-officially financed by one. However, that is not the most likely scenario.

More likely, it was “domestic”.

Did I mentioned how much I love euphemisms about my house burning?

So, the Third Eye Operation, our closest thing to a “secret police”, knows how the “operation” was done. Even it they still don’t know the author.

It was a cyborg-implant. A bomb, made into cyborg implant, mixed with living tissue, to go undetected. Someone put it in a pterodactyl.

Was either an uplifted pterodactyl, voluntary to die as a sort of suicide drone. Or some common pterodactyl conditioned by Astral Manipulation to make the precise fly that ended inside my living-room. We often forget that, since techno-magic is way more lucrative. But the first thing mages learned to do in the Astral Plane, before they awaken some Elder Vampires, was to meddle in our minds. Manipulate the sub-conscient of non-mages.

In centuries of practice, some schools of magic have developed very powerful skills for training low intelligence animals.

What was left from that pterodactyl is not enough to tell us whether it was a thinking person or a mindless beast.

The logical assumption is that who did the “action” had planned takin credit for it, loudly. There is no fun in making a bit scary stuff like that and not take credit for it. Just, my negligence in the field of dying made the entire stuff pointless, and a bit shameful for those who did it.

Was quite an investment just to burn furniture.

I do not have implants in my body. Not even the basic communication link most people use.

Instead, I keep my online existence in a cell phone. Pre-Baby Steps fashion. That was what saved my life. Because the lizard flied right to where my phone was. And that day I had forgotten the object on my dinner table. Was not for that, I would be dead.

As things are, the people who did this will likely never admit they spoiled a perfectly good plan, and lost a flying lizard in the process.