Granted. Someone has spraypainted racist slogans onto your fence with glow-in-the-dark paint. They also used a pressure washer to draw dicks on your deck, and those dicks are the only parts that are actually clean.
A sandstorm whips across your area, blasting the dirt and grime from your desk, as well as a quarter inch of the deck material, your house, and anything else aboveground. That includes your friends and neighbors, which raises a mixed mist of sand and blood at the end of the storm, which settles onto your nicely blasted fence, leaving a lovely coat of blood as paint.
Also, I now have to write that up as lyrics for a metal band.
You sob, cradling a limb, the greatest piece of what's left of your loved ones, their blood painting your once dusty monocolor fence crimson. The murder weapon, a rusty machete, lies embedded deep within a plank of your pristine deck, carefully cleaned of prints.
When the police arrive, there is only one suspect, and the trial is as short as the sentence is long.
Granted. It was an exceptional storm. A storm that meteorologists would study and publish papers on, in the hopes of making that one breakthrough that would catapult them from obscurity to prominence. None would ever make that ascension. The smart ones would give up their pursuits before it consumed them to the point of obsession. Leaving this aberration for the conspiracy theorists to debate if it was caused by some weather control device operated by some government, secret society, or aliens. The storm was, after all, quite simply impossible. So localized that did not even register on the instruments of nearby weather monitoring stations. So short lived that the only evidence that it ever took place, aside from the destruction, were the handful of videos from the eye witnesses.
Unlike the tornadoes and hurricanes typically used for comparison, this storm was not a cacophony of violence surrounding a core of relative tranquility. The videos clearly showed the exact opposite. A calm swirling of air gentling rusting leaves surrounding a vortex of destruction that limited itself to a single house, in the most uncanny way. Within the vortex, the house was being pulled apart. Lifted in a thousand tiny pieces, straight up into the sky, never to be seen again. Eventually, enough of the house had been removed to show a person in the middle of all the chaos --standing huddled, clutching something too small to make out in the videos-- and then they were gone. Taken so fast that they were there in one frame and gone in the next. Conspiracy theorists heralded what happened next as proof that this was a targeted attack and no natural phenomenon. The storm dissipated. Within seconds after the figure vanished from the screen, the swirling dirt fell to the ground, the trees stopped swaying, and all that could be seen where the house once stood was a pristine deck and a fence painted with the bloody remains of that lone person seen briefly and yet forever immortalized in the annals of the mysterious and unexplained.
Granted. You receive a brand-spaking-new violation notice in the mail from your new HOA board informing you that the outstanding violations have been addressed on your behalf due to your failure to act on the previous notices in a timely manner. The cost will be automatically included in your next HOA fee plus an additional $500 fine. From then on the HOA strictly enforces a clean deck and newly painted fence policy for as long as you should continue to live there.
I read "Mein Kampf." Hitler said something in it that really stuck with me. Basically: The people do not want democracy. They don't feel qualified. If you tell them they need to be the ones to chart the course for the country, they'll get uncomfortable, because they don't feel they have a good grasp of the issues and they have enough on their plate with their daily lives.
What they want is for someone to say: I understand the issues, I know exactly what to do, I'm strong enough to keep you safe and solve the problems. Don't worry about it. I can take care of it if you just put me in charge. I'll get rid of our anxieties about the world and make things good and everything will be fine. That's the type of leader and government they gravitate to, not someone who'll go into all the details or tell them that they get to make the decisions.
I do not agree with his prescription for what makes good government (hopefully goes without saying), but his grasp of how people operate, I think was spot-on.
People are tribal. They would still follow their favourite politician, even though they blatantly said how they feel about their constituents. People would justify it by saying the politician was speaking metaphorically, or that’s actually what they believe now. They would use religion to justify the politician’s remarks, and slowly change their own beliefs to fit with the tribe’s.
Wish granted. Because the personal is political, in some sense everyone is a politician, so it affects everyone. With no one left standing that has any shred of electability, we delegate the role of politician to various LLM chatbots. They run everything into the ground in fairly short order, but on the bright side hijinks aplenty ensue and it's pretty amusing to watch.
Granted. Everything is now extraordinarily boring and complicated, with every time someone opens their mouth, a long, dry, analytical summary of various problems and different theoretical solutions is given, with a long, nuanced list of potential pros and cons for each, presented in a realistic way where it is made apparent that not everyone can be made happy.
With no drama anymore, active voting percentage drops to the low double-digits for a period. Eventually populism disappears and only policy wonks are left running, and without obstructionism, they begin to actually try new things and solve some problems.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The planet, from a human perspective, will die within most of your lifetimes. I'm just here killing time. I have no real ability to prevent the looting of your futures. The people who are profiting are so avaricious and stunted that they're not really even getting any enjoyment from the whole process. It's purely the results of their own pathology, and our system malfunctioned and put them in charge because it was never designed on purpose. It all just happened that way, and so we're all fucked." A small murmur went through the pin-drop silent press pool at the expletive.
"Me too," he continued blankly, as the silence returned. "I'm actually trying to help, but the system makes it impossible for me to produce the level of change that's required. All I'm doing is producing angst and anxiety for myself and my family. I'm simply outnumbered by, basically, millions of malfunctioning AI models in suits trying to maximize a goal number even if it destroys us all. I did my best. I tried, but I'm just as much hampered by my own personal human limits as any of you are. The system is immensely powerful, easily capable of rejecting and replacing anyone who tries to produce genuine change. Each of us in government must either work to strengthen it and be rewarded, or reject it and be cast out, or resign ourselves to working for change within its parameters and therefore accomplishing nothing of lasting value with our lives."
"I'm happy to take any questions. We've got plenty of time today, as ironic as that is to say. Anyone ...? Yes, Hodges? NBC?"
I think there's a lot of variation. I know people who have worked in politics who say the people they worked on behalf of were genuinely good people who got into it because it's a way to produce positive change in the world. I also know other people who have worked in politics who said the people they worked on behalf of were the biggest POSes on a personal level that they'd ever encountered, just absolutely like the worst people in the world, 10 times worse than you think, that made their skin crawl to even have to interact with them.
Whether the guy from my little story is 30% of the people in government or more like 1%, or 0.1%, I think people of good faith can disagree about.
The Monkey's Paw
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