NationStates Jolt Archive

preface:

recently I happened upon a novel.

t was written in 1938 by the esteemed Robert Anson Heinlein: the title "For Us, The Living."

Scienece Fiction from the glden age, and the first attempt by the acknowledged master. recent release from the Book of The Moth Club!

I dug in and was not really disappointed. Although his craft as a writer was not yet where he would really start shining -- It was long before the soaring brilliance of Stranger In Strange Land or The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress -- it was still great Heinlein -- love triangles, deep philosophial conversations and of course things that seemed inpossible -- a man has a car accident in 1938 and wakes up 100 years later in a much different -- and calmer world.

Without ruining the story I will say that a lot of the problems Heinlein faced as a retired Naval worker in 1938 were there for him to dissect -- and solve, with the typical genius of Heinlein.

This is the inspiration for the unfinished story i present here -- the idea is that the year is 2047 and my little baby, the Commonwealth of Terran Individualists has -- well see for yourself!

very sincerely yours
doctor_v_jones
CTI

welcome to the commonwealth of terrn individualists
doctor v jones, archivist and international relations
liason

is a decaying wooden sign that i made and put up right
as you come down the paved stoneway towards the castle.

in recent years there is a lot of sitting around and
discussing philosophy, ethics, morals...the long years
of war are decades behind us and we are all more than
generally thankful.

that was another time: the political and philosophical
dragons of doublehanded international dirty politics and
tricks of wavelength and subterfuge of all different
kinds...seems a long time ago but we remember it...we
all learned a lot.

this gray and overcast but humidly pleasant day is a
perfect day for walking and discussing as we do on these
long early summer days as they stretch into evening.
there is also a lot of eating of melon paste and honey,
a lot of drinking of mead and other beverages. i have
been drinking a lot of cafe lately. it...

a lot of our insights to be certain are retrospective
insights; looking back at the world that was, before the
war started changing decisively, the years of turgid
intense diplomacy that were so crucial...

these days...we discuss...





”if you look up at the sky it’s obvious...the
vastness...there is so much matter there. there’s so
much matter, different stars of varying density but
there’s so much more mass...it generates huge fields,
the star mass and fields of energy, fields of magnetic
and fields of electric and fields of ethereal and fields
that afflict our subtle ethereal and physical bodies in
so many deep and subtle ways, ethereal..”

i looked at her.

there are some dutch seperatists that really like us a
lot, and they are laid and laid back dutch seperatists
who come here to vacation and alwas bring care
packages...

they all said “you can’t have an anarchistic
commonwealth that doesn’t mandate employment. there’s no
way for you to support yourselves!"

but of course we, as the planners, counted on and were not disappointed by
the kind benevolence of our international admirers.

but all that was a looong time ago.

“You know what i think, erosaren? i think you created
the universe in a past life and forgot about it so you
could have fun in it. that’s what i think now.,...after
all we’ve been through together and listening to your
strange talk.”


she cocked an eyebrow at me. “no...actually i haven’t
created it yet. it’s burgeoning in my mind...i’m waiting
to die so i can start creating it for real.”

when you live in a anarchistic commonwealth poplated by
fierce rogue individualists who spend so much time
thinking, there are wild sweeping conversations.
sometimes.

there was a head lice problem too. and
headlice...headlice, theoretically, can come back at any
time.

“ooh, you want to create ...you haven’t created
the universe yet?”
“no, marques. this is all a simulation. you can tell if
you look around the edges. you should have worn your
eyeglasses. i would show you.”


erosaren is not insane. not really. she is what they
used to call back in the late 1900s when we were kids,
one of those people who “think too much.” so am i...so
we go on talking. “oh, wait. i should have my glasses so
i could see the little desiging quirks that let me know
that it was you who created the universe..”


“like, uh, no, of course not. i told you...this is a
simulation. you need your glasses to see the little
cheap design gaps that let you know that this isn’t the
real universe...it’s a fake for simulation purposes.
you can really tell you look at the place where the
beach comes up, where the ocean meets the sand, see how
it’s so granular and pebbly?”

“pebbly isn’t really a word is it erosaren?”
“of course it is. but just you wait! When we get to
omega point, immaentize the eschaton and actually create
the real universe this one will have been only the
beginning.“

she laughed out loud very quietly. ‘oh,
yeah...got it all worked out. ‘s’gonna be awesome.’

of course we are joking.

the dutch separatists come over a lot. they show up in a
boat...they are the wildest bunch of people...in the
world, sometimes. and they come over and throw parties.


they really like the way that we live...it’s a cool
alliance.

right now there are some dutch seperatists sleeping off
a inrtense melon paste high in the bed and breakfast.
they party like animals...

my back hurts. it’s just an average morning.

“so anyway even if i did create the universe...there’s
little chance that i would have let YOU In on the design
schematics without first...oh, i don’t know maybe i
would have. butone of my best works is astrology.’
‘i agree, erosaren. the ...huh?’
‘you were so ready to agree with me...you don’t know
what the fuck i’m talking about do you? but the best
thing about astrology is... wel there are so many
things.’

the best thing about 2047 is computer advances. she
pulls this computr out of her pocket...it’s made of
plastic metal. she unfolds it and we sit down on the
beach. in about five seconds:

simulation of a night sky. the sun and a few planets
are simulatedly dancing slowly through the sky together.
shee the way over a few months that venus and mercury
and mars and jupiter al seem to dance around with sol
evry year? you can follow them with the ecliptic, the
green line.

actually the thing about the eclyptic is...you don’t
actually see the planets soto speak - ecep, well okay in
the early morning you can actually see venus and jupiter
lately prettywel sometimes. but that’s not my point. my
point is that the eclyptic is necessary or us to figure
out what stars will go along with the signs in the
progress of the sun through the sky in the course of a
year.”
she clicked the stylus on the screen, the perspective
changed and it showed the dalight coming andgoing from a
position on earth. her version of this program shows the
porch of the house with a huge starfield. “but generally
yu don’t see the stars - the actual stas that make up
the bodies of the constellations, during the day. ever.
like the stars would have to start glowing with black
light...or something.”
“i’m sore that happened once.’
she winkled her nose at meand stuck her tongue in the
side the cheek til it pokes out.s he make s a lot of
faces. ‘anyway the idea is that we say teh sun is in
gemini or the sun is in cancer or the sun is in
leo...that’s something no astrolnomer or astrologer for
that matter could ever see without the ecliptic,
withoutthe plotted path of teh siun through the
heavens...because they are never in the same place at
the same time to human eyes. i mean...’ seh pointed up
at the sky ‘ there ae casr and pollux, there is roughly
procyon. but i can’t see thpose stars now. iknow from
charting the path of the un through the sky in teh da
time. thenat night when the stars come out i look and
see where they would have been in relaion to the sun and
that’s how iknow that the sun s transiting sidereal
pisces or whatever sign it’s transiting. without the
ecliptic...well without the ecliptic if any scientist
wanted to track the path of the sun through the heavens
they would end up creating the eclyptic again. it’s
essential to astronomy!”

she smiled.”but here’s what i really think, okay?
saggitariuss is an archer because saggitarius was in
ancient times the ruler of -- n-no, it was ruled by - ‘
she shookhr had quicly -” it was ruled by zeus, or
jupiter, you follow?” i nodded.” zeus the king of the
gods. the create god also caled ptah-khepra. ‘ i totally
understand. hey look, it’s gabriel. “

she turned, squinted. ‘figures. anyway the point is zeus
created the ecliptic by drawing his mighty bow of
creation and firing a cosmic arrow that circes forever.”
‘wow...” said marques, ‘that
‘s amazing. it explains somuch. thank you, erosaren. ‘ a
l the otherplanets, or you could say, all the other gods
follow this pah becaue zeus i king and father and that’s
how it works. zeus is king and father and so hjis
arrow, the arrow of saggitarius, follows all around the
universe, the heavens see?” and she stod up from where
we had been squating and made a big sweeping circle
pointing up at an angle with her finger -- i stared. ”up
there in the stary firmament venus and mercury and mars
ane of course the others are constantly forever chasing
each oyher around zeus’ heaven. mercury stays close by
his father but he is always meting with the others,
to...and those are the lesser and greaer conjunctions as
mercurcy is coming and going, taking loveletters back
and forth between venus and mars, sending tough letters
back and forth between pluto and saturn..of course in
our vaguley human perspective plut and saturn don’t
communicate that often. and they are always very far
away from father zeus no matter how you look at it.
they are out there being cold...out there in
transpultonian space they deal more with merope and
aletcto, and al their other children.”
“their...?”
“oh, zeus and hera, zeus and merope, zeus and io, zeus
and callisto...hera was a real angry goddess for a while
there...that’s what al the old legends are about.”
‘we were...talking about astrology...’ i stared
uncertianly. ‘well we can’t really talk about astrology
without talking about the gods. talking about their
divine perspecive, how their cosmic interrelating
reflect in the subconscious minds of us wo were directly
created by their union. that’s...where we come from
when they talk about us bing created in god’s image,
well what god did you think they were talking about?
dummy.” she added but she said it in a nice way.’ that’s
why this stuff is advanced metaphysics i teach here. ‘

one of the big attractions of the terran individualists’
commonwealth - which is really just an anarchist commune
on a tropical island, is our schola.

we keep the schola constantly running, it’s always on
and, well, erosaren is the professor of advanced
metaphysics. she’s a great teacher actually...people
apply from all over the world to study under her. we had
to deny a lot of people emigration priivileges. it’s a
long mailing list!
gabriel teaches orchestral and symphonic instrumntal
music and they’res a long list of people who want to
come learn from him too. but we keep the immigrants
coming in at a powerfultrickle; not enough to ovrcrowd
us, it is a small island but enough to kept it fun and
diverse.

good morning children.” his face is deeply burnt,
creases and wrinkles accent his features. “what are you
talking about?”
“here’s another example. gabriel weilds a bow...are you
a saggitarius, gabriel?’
“maybe. i’m a Christian. so...melon paste?’
erosaren and i share a dour knowing look. we seem to
have this conversation every morning.

----
midday, humid and the sky was white gray with an
overcast; not stormy here, just sort of grey. actually
sort of nice. siting in a tree barefoot hanging down
eating melon paste...melon paste mixed with some of the
most poent thc oil ever grown. gabriel is rightously
proud of himself!!!

i’m pretty proud of him too. it was an excellent
harvest and this is definitely the most potent marijuana
strain in the world!-- another thing that keps the dutch
separtiss who call theselves "the Subgenius Federation”
constantly showing up to our lovely island to party and
sleep late into the afternoon...our commonwealh of
indiviualists, our gaian commune.

we all can clearly see the sun, it is a dim white circle
radiating behind the consistent cloud cover like milkin
the pacific sky.

we are scooping the warm sweet paste out of the inside
of the melon with our fingers and getting massively
high...
“what do you think that witgenstein would have said
about a day like today, gabriel?”
gabriel smiled. "he’d have said...it was nice.”
we were really angry people back in the days of war and
change. back in the, oh, was it the 1980s? when we
founded the terran commonwealth. we were angry and we
argued with it seems almost everyone in the world. but
we were diplomat, that was the way we did
politics...things have calmed down a LOT since then; we
spend long hours sunning ouslelves and eating melon
paste.

“but xeno of elea might have said that it was a beautiful
day," he sighed deeply, "even though it maximised plainness
and dullness for an island paradise in the pacific.”

“yeah. "says erosaren."or xeno of citium.”
“that is alwas the thing with the xenos...that’s really
why l prefer wittgenstein. there’s only one.there are
two xenos...and how do you know which said what to be
sure, to this day? and they both lived so long ago.”

when we started the commonwealth schola it realy gave us
the momentum we needed. and also it is our main export
and source of income.

first off we have an utterly religious and totally
pragmatic vison of green coexistance and earth
harmony...that’s one thing that the commonwealth exports
to the rest of the world for free. we all felt good
about that one...it was as if the terran individualists
had invented a 21st century equivalent to the metric
system and not copyrighted it, and shared it freely with
the world.

other nations were actually, looking back,
pretty quick to adopt the standads we simply
set in practice and discussed continually and openly with the rest of the world community. in 2004 there were NO nations that had adoped this standard of socilal conduct but we were an army of comapssionate, enlightened futurists...people caled us “the return of the prophets” and we helped amost literaly ‘turn the world green.”

that was twenty, thirty yeas ago...feels like...just
yesterday... - “but thanks to our work in the world at
large -- beyond our commonwealth - most countries by 247
had chosen to adopt green balance as a way of doing
things and cleaning up their local ecosystems...the
value to the world’s ecosystem is STAGGERING!"

we were the terran individualists, the new
philosophophers, the enlightened green ecologicians we
helped the world solve some problems they had been saying
for decades couldn’t be solved and...we were like a
snowball after awhile. it was heady for a couple of
decades...

things have calmed down now. and, i eat a lot of
melon paste.



so we sit around enjoying melon paste and congratulating
each other, cracking up about how funny it all is and
how scared we were once upon a time in the beginning
awhen we were just a band of anarchist upstarts out in
the pacific. now we have our scholas and do our arts
and crafts...

it’s a peaceful place.

yet we are smaller than the cuban island by a few miles.

suddenly i say just out loud. “remember when castro
died? he was so funny.” the others nodded.
fidel castro, before his death , was the only world
official ever to speak critically about the actions of
the commonwealth because what we did was embarassing to
his communist regime and we embarassed him and made it
really obvious in the international theater of
diplomacy. but we were immune to him, it was like our
vey existance was a middle finger, a raspberry and a
couple of other insulting gestures continually flying in
the face of what his Cuba represented politically...but
we were totally immune to him and all he could do is
point his finger and contribute the insane ranting
speeches that famously marked his last years of
life...the public collapse to babbling insane senility
and grasping refusal to relinquish power to the youth of
cuba was one of the most weird and shocking
international events of the mid-21st century, a time of
massive reversals, turnarounds, upheavals and changes.

we have a wooden bust of him wearing a carmen miranda
fruit hat at front of the door.

we were sort of flippantly reverent to him when after he died...he was
our young nations’ "yosemite sam” or our crazy cousin:

castro hated the CTI because we lived in a Commune but
it was obviously not a Commune -- as in not the paris
commune, we weren’t communist at all , but
anarchoindividualists banded together as one and doing
international activist agitation that was effective and
soght to bridge gaps and heal chronic soclal ills.

our guideline being a shared determination
NOT to repeat the mistakes of past sociial agitation.

(how the HELL did it happen? someone will try to tell me one day that he road to heaven is paved with evil intentions..but then there is william blake and his fanmous path to the castle of wisdom...maybe it all makes sense. but i am an old old man...)
we devoted our whole effort towads applying anarchist principles
toworld social problems with an eye towards
responsibility for the --and to the planet and the sanctity
of free will, and we swore solemnly not to do the things
that had failed in the past and not to put al of our
hopes on strategies that had left anarchist dwn for
decades. and we blew people’s minds. al over the world
in a realy short amount of time people were inviting us
to speak in front of their legislatures and in gigantic
hals up to thand inculding the united nations. our
determination was tikka ha olam in this century and,
well...
the world of 2047 is far from perfect but it is also so
much closer to perfect than the word society of 2004 that
none of us can imagine what life would have been like
had we not taken a stand as anarchists once and for all.
people LOVED us.

and we were the comonwealh of terran
individualists...

understand...these are the memories of a tired, tired old man! I am in my eighties now...i did al i could while i was young and still had my vitality. there were some narrow scarpes -- but they weredull narrow scraps, like misplacing passports at airports where i didn't speak the language and had lost the interpreter -- or getting lost in embassies and hotels in the 2020s. But -- nothing really romantic. Not in the swashbuckler sense -- we were diplomats. we did our best to avoide the mad "black blockers" -- they really became unpopular laughingstocks -- less because of our efforts and more because they were never really about sincere anarchism and it became obvious in the 20th centrury. they fooled a lot of people in the 1900s though...

we did evething above board and obviously and those
wholoved us FLOCKED in droves to give us the help we
needed. it was noncapitalsIt d.i.y. and it didn’t have
SQUAT to do with the Red left or capitalism.
predictably it worked well..unpredictably it unleashed
a domino effect of new realisations -- and a lot of
people suddenly - which is to say over the course of yeas
as the world changed - realised that realistic, practical, rational anarchism was what they had been looking for and they had been led to fear
what it represented by racists socialists who co-opted by actually cared littlke for anarchism -- the sirt who couldn't lie without organization and leadership -- the sort that had rallied under Hitler in the 1900s.

slickcon artists who fell out of favor like a newton’s apple - directly, unmistakably, globally, unilaterally and logically.

they fell out of favor and the world transfromed in the 21st century...

anyway..it was working, and it was communal without
being communist and thus was embarassing to everything
Castro was doing....Castro.

one of the last great dictators, was experiencing a mellow fall from grace
brought about by his advancing senility.

his refusal to relinquish the reins of power was like something straight out of Steinbeck; that and his advancing mental unsureness combined to make him one of the most ridiculous figures in the world scene of the
2020s

...and his internationaly broadcast speeches denouncing our island commonwealth were some of the best advertsing we ever got - he so vitriolocally denounced our every action and plitical statement even while so
many other of the leftist and left of center and centrists republics and democracies were rallying around our causes and adopting our political strategies in our own countries...
“Castro began to realise that he had been the perfect tool
of marx and lenin and he couldn’t believe it. he hated
us because we got communal existance perfect by acknowledging,
and then disregarding and ignoring bolshevism.”

“yeah...all those speeches.” gabriel stared out over the
ocean. albatross or something flew overhead.

”It’s not like we didn’t offer the olive branch over and
over!”

“why...i bet you say that to all the dictators.
shit. we did!” erosaen dimpled.

“it’s true, actually, we were as energetic and insistent
with our campaign of creating world peace through
lecturing and speaking outinternationally - we put as
much energy into our world peace campaign as any of the
militarist leaders of various factions had put into heir
war movements...and people loved us.

“We had exactly the answers they had been looking for
and the result was internationally devestating. and
there were only really seventy of us.

“but the whole idea - that seventy individual people
working togeher for world peace had more influencece in
a realy short period of time than the G7, the .. E. U.
and NATO - all because they liked what we had to say!”



i smiled. a lot of it had been my idea.

of all the things that make me happy as i face my
eighties here in the commonwealth, the thing i love
more than the mothers of my children is my long grey
hair. it grows in long locks down my shoulders...i am
so happy to be eighty something and finally have long
hair. i am old and will die soon but i am a hippie in
2047. it’s a warm and happy feeling--

like i did good things with my life, figured out where my priorities were when i was still young enough to put it into practice and have fun.
back when i had much shorter hair...and a lot more
energy.

i’m an old man now. but i can climb a tree.

i am dreaming...i am dreaming and my dream is nightmarish yet i am oddly not afraid..it is a wiild dream...in the last few years i have had this waking dream before...it is perhaps a side effect of the melon paste and thefact that i don't get much sleep lately..i drift off and i have visions of what the world would have been like had we never done the CTI as it looke dlike might have happened for a while back in the nineties after kathleen took her own life and we all started divorcing ourselves from the whole notion of new syyndicalist a ctivism and what the world looked like...there are wars and mroe wars and liars rule the earth. no joy. No delight. people scurrying, miserable -- the whole world looks like A chrismas carol by charles dickens...it's gray and people are grim and hopeless...it is an atheistic world that perhaps god has finally abandoned in disgust -- i have these daydreams while -- while my friends, younger and moe healthy are --“...AT LEAST , THAT’S WHAT THE TEACHERS WOULD TELL US, WHEN WE WERE TOO YOUNG TO REALLY DEFEND OURSELVES...”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”

but i am nodding and having dreams...dreaming of what the world would have been like had we not been bold and taken the initiative and spken out to the United natioons and the world about a ratinal anarchism a true anarchism that blended right wing and left wing theories with real zeal and a hope for solving -- oh, in these dreams i have lately i see thw world as it would have been had we not -- all the monstorus plans of the New( new? bah. platonists...how was it new? it was centuries old. Ceasar, Kaiser, Tsar...same old rotten Platonists, toadying fawning scum of hellas, sucking up to Martial power. Old)World Order that was thwartd, ultimately, early on in the 21st century, simply by people admitting that they were there and they were doing what they did...in these dreams i have the world never really recover from their horror of technocracy and mental governance and it is a dull world, alove but lifeless and bland...everyone is so drained of enthusiasm..i shudder in my lucid half sleep, i can still hear the taking but i can't wake up i am drowning in this day dream..i wish someone would wake me up...

my great grandmother when i wa smuch younger would have harsh deep nighmares, she would scream in teh middle of the night GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE -- who knows what sort of dark things were attacking her as she dreamed? perhaps bits of beef emitting foul gases into her system, perhaps foecal sandwich bits that never were expelled that deteriroated her health...in her nineties she was healthier than i am now but -- oh..these dreams, the s dreams! --
the dreams of an old man.

“OH, IT’S JUST A THEORY OF EVOLUTION. BUT ON THESE
SIMPLE LINES, GABRIEL: CHILDREN ARE BORN BASICALLY
UTTERLY KNOWLEDGABLE ABOUT THEMSELVES, THE
UNIVERSE...THAT’S WHERE WE GET ALL THE CHILD PRODIGES,
THE PRE EDUCATED GENIUSES. MARQUES! MARQUES!!"

“what are you talking about? i drifted off...into a
reverie."

“oh. Well, marques, you’d know. the reasons for
starting the schola? educators inflicting and enforcing
on their students a core insecurity, a sense that they
could never have the answers.”

“oh, um, that. yeah...i think the classicists started that
one. you know...for a while in school i knew a lot of
other kids who wouldn’t enroll because they would get
thrown out by teachers who knew less, simpy for going
against commonly held delusions that...it was a gradabale
offense. meaning failing grades. and...well sometimes,
it was as bad as the vatican’s assertations on the
flatness of the earth. but that was sort of a long tme
ago...i mean the nineteen - eighties...”

“of course...” Gabriel musied.

“the point of the schola is that we could establish a
learning environment that did not turn students into
targets for ridicule...and the whole idea of this later
fine tuning of evolution is the idea of subconscious
sabotage of evoution by older generations. that was,
onmce again, the mentality of the western time -- it;s
soo obvious in the west...it goes along with the whole
ideaof woman as generally an idiot child compared to males
in terms of deserving and being capable of obtaining
education, as wel as slavery and in a very large
perspective, the whole mentality of he Western mind --
that the world was something to be mastered, dominated,
bent to the will of males. that epistemological error
practically -- it’s one of the guideposts that we could
see the evolutionary cul-de-sac defining intself.
‘the fact is evoluion was cruising forward and we stated
waking up when we noticed that. on the other side of the
evolutioary fork were those who clung to old methods out
of fear or addiction to the imbalance of power that had
been created.”

‘where did it start?”
“some say it started in the rennaisance, some say it has
its sources in eden. i don’t know...”


to be concluded