1??????????Soul Bound
1.2????????Taking Control
1.2.2??????An Awakening Epiphany
1.2.2.39???Bulgaria''s answer
Kafana: “Third question. Wellington thinks your motive for this project is to change how people solve problems. But you were very careful to not get involved when we came up with the purpose ‘Free the minds and you change the world!’. I know you. You’re like me. The abstract can motivate you a bit, but you work from the gut, fuelled by outrage, by a specific incident that solidifies something for you, that crosses a line in the sand. You wrote in the Burrow about the importance of not letting your enemies know your true motives, and given the lengths you’ve gone to, to avoid enemies using mind magic to learn from us even about even minor capabilities you were hiding, it beggars belief that you wouldn’t also have wanted to conceal from us what your full priorities are. But if I’m to make equitable decisions that balance the needs of everybody in the party, to make sure we all get some of what we want, I’ve a legitimate need to know your true motives. I promise I won’t be using it to manipulate you or short change you. What do you want? What do you really want and why? What’s the end game, if the best-case scenario happens and you get to enact it?”
Bulgaria: “That empathy of yours is a killer. When you pay attention, you don’t even need that diadem.”
She waited.
Bulgaria: “Did you know there are now two million people who don’t live on Earth? Most live in habitats on the moon, but increasing numbers live out in the asteroid belt, on assembly and cargo handling stations, or just in ships doing their own thing. The off-Earth population has been doubling every 8 months, ever since the New Detente was announced in 2035, after the bad years. If it carries on at this rate, the people off-Earth will outnumber the people left on-Earth in just 8 more years. That rate of emigration isn’t sustainable, even if we crack fusion power. We just don’t have the lifting capacity. But even if we did, even if space ships could be auto-fabricated as cheaply as socks, the spacers don’t want most of Earth’s population. They’ve been skimming off the ones they see as being the best and brightest; the ones with the ‘right stuff’ who are a good fit for the culture and way of life they’re developing up there. They think most ‘earthers’ are selfish, corrupt and nationalistic.”
Kafana: “Are they right?”
Bulgaria: “Imagine contented rats of leisure living in a garden of paradise, wearing embroidered waistcoats and declaiming poetry to their loves, able to reach up a hand at any time to pick low hanging fruit from the trees.”
Kafana: “I sense a ‘but’ coming.”
Bulgaria: “But one rat is ambitious. He realises that if he gets up earlier than the others he can pick more fruit and support a larger family. Others copy him, and soon all the low hanging fruit gets consumed. After a few years of this, some trees (whose fruit never get time to rot and drop on the ground to seed) get wiped out, leaving only taller trees to spawn the next generation. The average height of trees increases, and now the rats have to work harder to pick each piece of fruit.”
Kafana nodded.
Bulgaria: “Now the majority of the rats, the ones who didn’t copy the ambitious guy, have to make a choice. They can tighten their belts, have smaller families, or they can reduce the hours they spend composing epic poetry. They choose to work harder, and maybe tell a few limericks while picking. They’re not happy about it, but it is better than the other option.”
Kafana: “I see where this is going.”
Bulgaria: “Now the ambitious ones give up poetry too. They team up to form rat pyramids so they can pick even higher fruit, which is hard on the ones at the bottom who get a bit clawed, but it gets the job done. After a few decades of competitive cycles, none of the rats are happy. They’re all working their tails off, as hard and smart as they can, to get enough of the limited resources to keep their families expanding. All other activities are discarded, no time for pretty waistcoats. As the limits are pushed, resources become harder and more costly to extract. You eventually end up with naked rats scrabbling among piles of bleeding corpses to reach mouldy apple cores, snarling at each other with fangs bared.”
Kafana: “I don’t like your fairy story.”
Bulgaria: “It is a mathematical pattern we see again and again. Schools competing on test scores, until nothing gets taught except what appears on the test. Businesses competing for investors, reducing safety margins and increasing hours until they care about nothing except dividends and stock prices. Countries hoping to attract long term benefits from businesses basing themselves there, competing against other countries to offer lower tax rates and regulations, resulting in all the countries being worse off.”
Kafana: “Is it really that inevitable?”
Bulgaria: “It is a coordination problem. Trade unions help coordinate against a reduction in workplace safety. Universities helped coordinate against school districts that turned out school-leavers who didn’t fare well at university. Globally mobile workers mitigated against countries racing to the bottom, because they didn’t want to live in communities with no public services even though they could afford to go private. The problem is that the penalties for defecting out of coordination arrangements were not high enough. As organisations became global and nations became more polarised, coordination broke down. More and more opted for the quick gains that defection could bring them.”
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Kafana: “So you think the spacers are right? Earthers are undesirables?”
Bulgaria: “No. Not intrinsically undesirable. We’re the same people our ancestors were; the same as the spacers are. What’s changed is the payoff matrix. Technology and other factors altered the potential gains the people in power could make by acting badly, until the system reached a tipping point, and acting badly became their logical course of action. If you change the payoff matrix so that’s no longer their logical course of action, you can reverse the process.”
Light green.
Kafana: “And the rats will suddenly start trusting each other again, compose long elegant elegies for their rat family members killed by their neighbours, and start shopping for waistcoats?”
Bulgaria: “We both know it won’t be easy. There will be bad habits to unlearn, wounds to heal and people defending the current status quo to overcome. It will take a hefty nudge, but it could be done. If people realise it can be done. If they regain hope.”
Green.
Kafana: “What do you want? What do you really want? Boil it down for me.”
Bulgaria: “I want to stop this damn polarisation. This hatred, mistrust and lack of understanding people have of each other. I want them to really talk to each other, see each other as individual humans, not faceless ‘others’. I want to teach the world how to discuss things constructively again, build a consensus, and compromise. I want to bring back cooperation.”
Deep rich green.
Bulgaria: “Wellington wants to improve people’s ability to coordinate, just everyday average people, because there are billions of them. Not only do they outnumber the Spreckels, Huttlestons and Jiangs of this world but they also control more wealth and potentially more power, if they exercised it. But the ability to do it won’t help if they don’t want to make use of that ability. People need to think less in terms of ‘my people’ versus ‘those other people’ and more in terms of ‘all of us people’ versus ‘the situation’. When two groups compete desperately, without constraint, both groups lose.”
Green.
Kafana: “Plenty of people, through history, have preached peace and love. People have talked about the situation being the problem since Meditations On Moloch and, earlier, since Yippies in the 1960s. What makes you think we have a chance where so many others have failed?”
Bulgaria: “It goes back further than that. Even Diogenes in Greece and Zhuang-zi in China saw the problem. But it isn’t peace and love I want to teach, nice though that would be. It is cooperation and constructive discussion. You don’t have to love or agree with an opponent in order to achieve a workable compromise and keep to it. Having the imagination, the desire, to look for third options; the hope needed to put the effort in sitting across the table from someone you despise, someone who hurt you, and treat them with the minimal respect required for civilised discourse, rather than falling back on simpler comfortable patterns of rage and ritualised threat displays.”
Green.
Kafana: “You know where I come from. ‘I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I and my brother and my cousin against the world’. Vendettas last generations. It is going to take more than watching a small group of people playing a velife game to change that.”
Bulgaria: “We’ve got one thing going for us that previous generations didn’t have. Tiara technology. Wellington sees it as a potential threat to liberty. Bungo sees it as a route to becoming more than human. I see it as an opportunity for understanding. After leaving UCL I spent years travelling, getting in contact with grassroot movements, advising them on how to take effective political action. I had some successes and many failures. I’ve ended up on the hit list of many a country and company, and have only survived by learning to be very very security conscious. Sun Tzu advised that one be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness; be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. But it tears me up inside, every time I have to leave a failing cause, abandon a struggling friend. I can’t keep going. The Burrow is my final stand. The struggle for how tiara technology gets used is the ultimate high stakes game, no cards held back. The destiny of eight billion humans trapped on Earth, discarded and despised, is on the line.”
Deep rich green.
Kafana stood up and sang a few lines, quietly:
<blockquote>
I am the future of the world
I am the hope of my nation
I am tomorrow’s people
I am the new inspiration
</blockquote>
Kafana: “Is that what you want from me?”
Bulgaria stood, facing her on the dock. He replied angrily, passion now evident in his voice, stung to loss of control: “Don’t trivialise it! It isn’t innocence I need. It is strength and compassion. I can’t do this by myself. I got us this far, but I’m too weary, too shop worn. Nobody is going to see the world through recordings of my emotions and feel inspired. I said it was my last stand, but that’s cowardice. You were right, when you said I’m asking for someone to wear a big luminous target on their back, the way I never had the courage to. To stand, where I’ve fled. To speak truth where I’ve indulged in being mysterious, and to expose their very soul to the public where I’ve zealously protected my own privacy. I need a hero. Lead, really take on leadership, not half-heartedly play at it, and I’m yours. I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth, through thick and thin, success and failure, death or glory.”
The gem of truth on Kafana’s diadem blazed with a green so strong and bright it illuminated the pond, the walls and every building around them.