Another Parable For A Winter’s Afternoon
The old book seemed to be a history text book. Appearing to be a 21st Century artifact, it had been overlooked in the bottom of a box in the dimly lit storage closet. It had to be a leftover from the old days before AI managed learning, and wireless implants linked almost everyone to the cyber storage of authenticated knowledge. The book described the invention of a country based upon a document.
This country was based upon a document and the document was unassailable. The document could be altered, but alterations were so difficult that it happened only seventeen times in two hundred years (and one of those changes merely retracted a previous alternation) The document was less than five thousand words but applied unilaterally, even as the country dramatically increased its size and population and even though urban citizens in rarefied parts of the country had nothing in common with rural citizens living thousands of miles away. The document’s prime directives were liberty and representation, even when 5 percent of the country’s population legally controlled 65% of the wealth. But everyone loved this document, because it was concise and well composed and presented a possible utopia where everyone was the same. It was so beloved that the citizens of this country decided they would stick with it no matter what happened or what changed, the the premise of discounting (or even questioning) its greatness became so verboten that any political candidate that did so would have no chance to be elected to any office above city alderman. The populace decided to use this same document forever, inflexibly and without apprehension, even if the country lasted two thousand years.
Viewed retrospectively, it would not seem stunning that this did not work out.
Excerpted from But What If We’ve Wrong? — Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman
