day 17 of 30

NanoWriMo2005
J E D Cline
Title: “The Ark of 1984’s Future”

day 17 of 30

Artesiana arrived at her Holopresence nook the next morning to begin her day’s work, to find that a request had been made, to build a copy of it over in the Tanfl headquarters part of SpaceDock1. She wondered, why would they want one? Surely they thought it was just a recreation device for fantasy escape. They would not know how to use it, anyway.

Tanfl was boss here, however, and not to be ignored; she called the construction foreman and told him to build the external visible parts of a Holopresence nook over where Tanfl had requested it be built.

Soon she was contacted by Idealiana, who related her experience in the early morning a few hours before. That Artesiana was at her Holopresence station meant that things indeed had backed off, scaled back discretely; so they too would resume as if nothing had happened. Construction would continue smoothly as before; there were cities to be built, total recycling plants to be built, and human civilization was acting human again after a brief nightmare of ego-inspired stumbling.

Idealiana began a new project, one she had not wanted to do: she needed to figure out how to cope with the secret terrorism that was foundation behind Tanfl’s rule, and, she guessed, behind the modus operandi of all bullying, the urge to create extreme fear in others to get them to comply with the bully’s group-enforced demands ... it had been reproductively very successful for eons, and seemed now to be getting more powerful. She thought sadly about her own daughter Donna Bulguarde, fathered by Rationallo and now being raised in the Tanfl tradition. What would become of her dear daughter? That part seemed even more hopeless.

For now, she had to learn to comprehend the force behind the urge to forcibly control others; it had something to do with “ego,” probably. And likely a genetic component, too. Or maybe a pathogenic parasite that got physically exposed to family members down through the generations? It had something to do with an urge to be ”superior” to others, instead of being highly competent in tasks, and being respected for their competent work. Somehow, that “competency” gets twisted into the ability to coerce others, usually by some set of group rules. Bullies in school were not pariahs, but normally were highly esteemed by their peers for their demonstrated ability to terrorize others, particularly to scare the socially inept brainy students, and gathered companions to be led by the bully, forming hierarchies of “status.” In most of the bullies, it became tamed by the educational process and corporate structure position risings, became the normal way of doing things. Yet, it was still the same fundamental thing behind it all, the beast within some people, usually dominant males, and was a mammalian trait very much exhibited in mammalian herd beasts. Perhaps in the study of those herds, she might learn the key to the problems gaining power even now, when mankind was finally expanding civilization into space in a big way, able then to allow Mother Earth to recover from birthing such a wayward progeny that had nearly killed life on the planet. It had something to do with arranging to put the opponent(s) brains into the fear mode, fight-or-flight reflexes at the ready, sometimes called “life in the trenches” from the archetypal mode of living in trenches along battle lines in W.W.I. Trenches were not a safe place from which to get up and look around at the larger picture, thus such people are easily controlled by others’ interpretations of what goes on up there beyond the safety of the trench.

Some had written that the advancement of civilization was solely caused by the technological development of weapons to be used in the assaults, and of who conquered who thereby. The technology then was visibly there for use in civilian applications. A cycle of converting swords into plowshares into swords again, over and over. Would people just go lazy, do nothing, no technology development unless spurred by need to defend or assault? She paused to think about that ... it seemed likely that would be true for a lot op people she knew, but not of all of them. It also seemed that the “bully” phenomenon correlated to the need to assault & defend.

Deeper into the exploration of the phenomenon, she realized that humans, pansy and open aggressor alike, ate food. And that food was the substance of creatures that had been alive, and had now died to become food; this was true of carrot and chicken alike. Even the chicken depended on eating living stuff. Only vegetation derived life directly from the sun, yet even they often depended on some nutrients from decomposed other formerly living bacteria or animals. Omnivores, carnivores, all were predators upon the system that sustained them. Maybe there was no solution to the problem, if life itself depended on being a successful predator. Maybe Rationallo and his ilk were merely better predators than the others, and she merely a grumbling “loser.” She searched for the error in this logic, feeling quite uncomfortable with it.

Was mankind being predator on the Moon by building this StationBase1 and preparing to send lunar materials to be used to build cities in GEO? It had been a lifeless place, and now they had brought life to the formerly barren landscape. Bringing life to where there had been no life before, appealed to her motherly instincts. That part seemed finally something not predatory: to create life where there had been none before.

And yet there was the basic process of tearing down and building up again out of the dismantled materials, something new then created. Was that not like eating food? The caught mouse becoming cat?

It was now the end of her break time, and time to get back to the task of building and operating the lunar base. It was part of the long term responsibility of restoring the Earth. But she carried with her the unsettling awareness that there were some humans, not too unlike her own self, that would destroy her works, even though her works were to help everybody, even them, to better survive. It did not seem sane, yet more likely it was simply caused by misinformation combined with the bully urge on the loose.

The more she thought about that, the more it seemed to be the cause of most of the problems of the world: misinformation plus the bully-urge on the loose. Bullies used information too, so it boiled down to the bully-urge. It was not being tamed enough by the system of giving them top management slots, law enforcement hunting among others, football game prestige. So how to tame it? It was not testosterone itself, it was the motivation pattern, that was the cause. and thus maybe a key to solving the problem: deal with the motivation pattern behind bullying.