It was the year 2507. Humanity had become relatively civilized. Life was easy, except the more intangible parts of it. Necessity had been reduced to-so what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Earth-nature interfaced with humans in a safe manner. And human violence had been almost entirely eradicated. There were only two locations where serious hazard was still to be found, in the black relatively unprotected reaches of space, and inside the human psyche. Its space was almost entirely unexplored.
*It’s terrifying to see a hundred years of emptiness spread out in front of me when I don’t have the slightest idea of how to fill it.
Violence and its religious passion-ritual-war-had been eliminated from human experience. Its potential still existed in every human at moments of fear and despair. But to act upon its impulse was so expensive-permanent banishment from normal human society to a segregated community of other “violents”-that other options were always pursued … except for a very occasional genetic throwback incapable of personal restraint in spite of almost guaranteed conviction.
Humans had learned to mistrust secrecy, as differentiated from privacy’s ‘don’t bother me unless you’re invited’. If you have to hide where you were, then you must be up to no good, not to be entirely trusted. Biological censors present everywhere identified traces of individual DNA in the air, as well as any other trace element, of everyone present anywhere at any given moment, making criminal investigation a piece-of-cake. Dishonesty was no longer worth a plug nickel.
A century of depression followed the cessation of violence. People were suddenly left with their own aggressive impulses without any natural external behavioral outlet, forcing them to live with their own disappointment and anger … unless they were fortunate enough to have a loved one willing, for brief moments, to listen to anger’s violent complaints.
It took a whole century for a large enough minority-the critical mass necessary to trigger general consensus-to discover the value of finding the root source of anger and pain in them selves. What had been psychotherapy Tragg and the Sky Gods the foundation of normal education beginning early in childhood. When studying yourself became the core of learning anything, categories of understanding automatically interconnected within a matrix that was best defined as the life of the studying person.
In X-Men movie manner everything was far more clearly understood by making all judgments subjective, while insisting that this subjectivity be always accountable to and consistent with every piece of their life. If the pieces didn’t cooperate with each other, then learning was required … taking the risk that it might Webkinz sending shock waves through the whole matrix of that person’s life.
Previously knowledge had been dissected into bits of information, like physics, history and anthropology in order to eliminate emotion as a contributing member of the team by making the area of study smaller than a feeling. Emotion, when it happens, is very specifically focused. But it comes from a very large place. Each feeling carries the whole weight of the human heart.
In those ancient times emotion was viewed as violence and chaos making. Until physical violence was eliminated externally, making life safer, humanity routinely turned feeling into action. This primitive performance was a vestige of their mammalian predatory roots that no longer fit them. But they hadn’t yet evolved to be able to handle a feeling experience as an emotion, instead of a motivation to act.
Religion had evolved to life-worship.
Each person worshipped their own life as the largest living entity they would ever be inside of, thus deserving the awe and deep respect they felt toward the god-like talents of the human spirit, which became increasingly available to them. The spiritual thrust of this religion was the quest to make their life as fulfilled, useful and enlightened as they could possibly achieve.
*Why is everything up to me? Why must I always decide for myself? It’s maddening to be so alone. What a curse to be given exactly what you want.
Diary of a searching person: *When I get tired of my playroom with all its techno-toys, and walk the aerobic five miles my body insists upon every day, and I have lunch…what then?
I spent twenty years before my body forced me to be social just to find the other with whom I would mate.
I … we spent the next twenty years playing with things.
I spent the next ten years traveling through the universe. Its mostly vast emptiness made me know what it is to have consciousness with nothing for it to do. I rushed back home on Earth so at least I had something familiar.
We played with space like a toy filling it with our arrogant innocence ready to go everywhere, no matter what the risk.
Until ninety nine percent of those living on Mars died from an enormous sun-flare that enveloped the red planet-and we all were suddenly terrified to be aware of the enormous risk of ever leaving Earth.
Fifty years later shielding became available. But it was only seventy percent reliable. We never did find a foolproof way. So space travel became noted for its fast escape from the solar system to get out in the blackness where stars couldn’t wipe you out. But after ten years the emptiness produced overwhelming panic in more than half of the humans originally deemed fit to be pioneers. Space was like war. There were great risks in it.
The human world suffered huge depression for the next century realizing that space had become a limited option. Physical movement and things became what they really are-toys. Only in the hands of a human person could any technology come to some good use.
This realization sparked another thirty years of global depression. That human life was mostly about emotional and spiritual reality.
We’d needed for centuries to wander off into an abstracted place to find out about reality. Truth was too unbearable seen nakedly. It evoked terrifying overpowering emotion and instant violent reaction-something humans did for almost twenty thousand years before they learned to stop killing each other.
For eons humanity thought Space 1999 was the magical balm to cure killing and other forms of injustice. When love is, as much good, as it is bad. In addition to healing powers, love is also violence’s energy-source.
The need part of love for all those centuries confused predation-for-food with killing for emotional satisfaction, calm and oblivion from whatever it was that frightened them-at the price of anyone else’s life. Automatic sexual passion had merged with human trauma urgently seeking repair, giving love the right to kill in the name of inescapable and overwhelming need.
Where will it ever end?
Don Fenn
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