The Culture of Progress
Short Story
I told you once the history of Progress is rather boring. It is time for you to understand why. You have seen the lengths we undertook to improve ourselves and our city, but what happens to what we leave behind? Do you think everyone was willing to embrace the better future? Some grew rather comfortable with their organic bodies. Some liked the architecture of the city. Some even had a certain fondness for their own ideas, regardless of their validity against the Grand Vision.
Indeed, there are only three options for addressing dissidents in any nation. The first is to allow these malcontents to simmer within the body, tolerating their presence and allowing them to reproduce. Such a strategy is foolish. At best, these minorities will be contained by the strength of the majority. At worst, the dissident groups will grow like an infection. They will contaminate the body like a virus, converting it to their foul aims.
Do you think Progress could or would tolerate such an option? A threat needs to be dealt with, especially if it comes from within. No one must stand in the way of the Grand Vision, and so we come to the next two options: reeducation or reassessment.
For a time, Progress considered the former of the two. I am sure you are aware of the basic strategies. One can convert by the diplomatic hand instead of the sword. We invited these dissidents to experience the culture, educated their children with the correct upbringing, encouraged them to abandon their destructive values.
Progress took these measures early on, and what better way than to show these dissidents how wrong they were by demonstrating the great reward of Progress! We dedicated entire worlds to the delights that our city has to offer. You beings from the World of Before can only conceive of such things in drugs and sex, but we are far more sophisticated than that.
Indeed, you saw one such avenue in the previous letter, but do not think we forcibly put people in those factory chambers. They all went willingly! We were merely offering them a path to salvation. Our goal was to reeducate these people, to bring them back to society, not have them puppet-flesh trapped in vats. And I can attest that many were enthralled by the paradise Progress could offer them. More than that, these first defectors became our vanguard.
Even more than our most loyal supporters, these men and women fought the hardest for the vision of Progress. The defectors sought out their friends and even their own family to join them in our beloved city. We were astonished to the lengths they went for even strangers. No one loved the dissidents more than them. I think they couldn’t bear to see the sight of what they had once been.
Indeed, the most outspoken of the rebellious were finally forced to flee into the furthest reaches of existence. They couldn’t do otherwise, as to remain would risk their traitorous wills to fall to our cause. That was the righteousness of Progress! Even our enemies could not help but run from us lest they find themselves loving our city.
This sufficed for a while, but as time moved on, Progress had to employ more aggressive measures to weed out the dissidents who yet remained. It deeply saddened us that there were still some who persisted in their ignorance. More than that, the dissident unexpectedly proved a greater threat than ever.
Much as a virus can adapt to a treatment after prolonged exposure, so too could these foul elements become stronger in the face of our kindness. Our days of subtlety were long behind us. We established loyalty centers to question the traitors and weed out those who threatened our cause.
Even then, Progress was merciful! All we wanted was to remind those people of what wonderful bounty our beloved city had given them. We wanted to show them all that Progress had done for them and bring them back to the Grand Vision.
And you, dear children of the World of Before, must know how we corrected them. The body, by its own fallacious design, will eventually fail under too much pressure. The mind and the intellect crumples under nothing more than a stiff breeze. However, you now know we have designed bodies beyond human capacity. We have created intellects capable of sensing and feeling more than anything you can imagine.
I cannot begin to describe to you the methods we employed. As you cannot perceive radiation, so too I cannot describe to you what awe-inspiring sights with which we uplifted the ignorant. The cells of their eyes were so elegantly and brilliantly designed so that they could never wither or rot away from the exposure.
Likewise, you who cannot endure much tribulation do not know true strength. Imagine for a moment that we placed you in the heart of a star; your weak body would disintegrate in mere moments. You are not strong enough to withstand the world-crushing pressure, nor resilient enough to survive the temperatures of a furnace that would tear apart your very atoms.
Even still, your intellect is similarly weak. You can only conceive of linear time, but we in Progress are beyond that now. I want you to think of an eternity looped back around itself. You, who would go mad in a few years of such isolation, cannot understand the majesty of contemplating silence as time never ceased.
You think such measures harsh? Nonsense! We were just trying to show what they were forsaking. Most uncivilized societies would deal out cruel punishments, but we only uplifted those who came to us. We were not dispensing a mockery of justice for the sake of base instinct, but kindness for the sake of rehabilitation. Our task stood as a fiery beacon to the rest of mankind, and we had the right—no the duty—to correct anyone who comes in the way of this admirable goal.
However, even after all this effort, a surprising quirk of humanity arises. You will find those rare individuals, perhaps one in a million, who stand to the challenge. They not only resist such an environment but thrive and wait for when the culture finally slackens. Their descendants follow them likewise, and when the strength of the city fails, they may finally have their day. In truth, Progress never cured the virus, but only strengthened it. The medicine killed off the weaker strain, leaving part of the disease intact to flourish. The cancer comes back and spreads again until the host finally succumbs.
No, in combating mutagens, one must take an aggressive approach. It is not nearly enough to create a hostile environment; one must declare war on the pathogen. An all-out conflict which will not stop until every trace of the contaminant has been scrubbed away. Indeed, this strategy is the only one which ensures the survival of the host.
So Progress came to the third option and reassessed the continued survival of these dissidents. Again, you might think such an approach is barbarous. But tell me, how long would you tolerate a person antithetical to your values? Not just morally repugnant to you, but actively working to undermine everything you stand for? How long before you are forced to remove the person?
Holy war was waged, and war was won. It was a dutiful conflict which stretched across the skies of a million worlds. Indeed, the stars were cleansed of the filth holding Progress back. Sometimes by purifying fire over a planet’s surface or perhaps by the all-consuming void of a black hole. It made no difference in the end. Progress was finally clean.
Yet a question emerged out of our victory. Had this war been truly necessary? Not in the sense of its purpose, but in its need to begin with. When a person dies of disease, men often place the blame on the virus, but we are not men. Really, there are two parties at fault. The person’s body failed to overcome the pathogen. The body’s weakness is just to blame for the death, as is the disease.
That we needed a war showed us this weakness in Progress itself. Had the people been more energetic, had they been more loyal, perhaps such efforts would never been needed at all. It is almost certainly the case that there were silent loyalties for those dissidents. People who stood by and watched, hoping that the dissident cause would bear fruit but not having the courage to take part in the conflict.
Progress must have the hearts and minds of its people; it cannot do to have any less than that. These people were an obstacle to our utopia, a dead weight drowning us in their filth and perversity. And yet somehow, serendipity finds itself again. What a blessing! Progress now had the full apparatus to encourage our citizenry.
We applied the educations, the loyalty centers, and even small cleansings to the people with ever more fervor. They revealed their hidden disloyalties just as we anticipated, and the weakness of those who were once an unnoticed thorn, we now plucked bloody from the flesh. However, the stream of people soon became a torrent and then a flood.
Our institutions became full. Where once we could service a million and even a billion—now trillions came through on a daily basis. There were soon not enough teachers to educate, loyalty officers to correct, and even soldiers to cleanse the masses. It was all too much, and our once glorious city now struggled with the burden.
Progress buckled under that weight.
I speak not mistruth. The great city of Progress could not bear the number that needed to be uplifted. Our beloved city failed at this most critical of tasks. It would’ve fallen into ruin if not for a single man: the one who abolished our history.
I was fortunate enough to meet him several days before his retirement. The meeting took place in a hospital room. I noted the tile floors reeked of chemicals and other disinfectants. Surrounding me, pale walls were made of boring plaster and displayed unimaginative, abstract art. Above, a ceiling fan listlessly creaked around and around. The only noise was a television hanging from the ceiling tuned to some forgotten show of a forgotten time.
The Librarian was laid out in a hospital bed. His sickly body kept upright by a stale metal bed which was given a few cream sheets for some illusion of character. The Librarian’s frame was skinny and sunken. His wrinkled, bald head was a patchwork of veins and brown splotches completed with a sneering face. A hand shakily clutched at his hospital gown as he wheezed with every breath. His other arm rested at his side with two plastic tubes running out into a machine.
I have given you translations in the past and stated frequently that our bodies are not actually like this. It has been an arduous labor to supply with you with the most accurate imagery, but here I speak the full truth. Progress had given The Librarian the singular honor of being allowed to remain behind—so long as he was kept out of sight.
“What is this?” The Librarian coughed as he noticed me enter. “You are not one of my attendants. Leave.”
“I only want to talk,” I spoke as I took the seat next to him.
He turned his head away from me. “No, I do not wish to be judged by the likes of you.”
“I am not a judge,” I responded.
He turned his head toward me, and his withered voice judged me. “You are no better; I can see right through you. I know who you really are, even if you pretend to be innocent. You’re just as responsible as the rest of us.”
“I never claimed to be anything different.”
His cataract ridden eyes squinted at me. “The Esteemed One can’t see it, but I can. Still trying to save your work, are you? After everything you’ve done? I should turn you in right now.”
Dear Reader, even as I pen these words to you, I cannot help but take pause here. Every once in a while, something cuts right to the core of your being, the pain swift and immediate. It is the word of truth striking against your soul. The Librarian was no ordinary man. I fear him even as I sit in relative safety.
This task of mine—these letters—they are not allowable within Progress. They are a personal discretion of mine, a secret which I cannot allow to be uncovered. If The Librarian so wished, he could easily reveal my most guarded treasure. I confess I had thought about not approaching him at all for fear of what might happen, but this account cannot do without him.
“I am here for what you have to say,” I stuttered more than a little, unable to muster any better response.
The Librarian spat on the polished floor. “What I have to say? Why would what I have to say matter?” He smiled as he twisted those words deeply into my gut.
I could not stomach any more of this. “You can be silent if you wish.” I stood from my chair and began to walk out of the room.
“Wait!” The Librarian’s gravely voice called as I was about to step over the threshold. “You want to talk? We’ll talk. I promise that I won’t tell anyone. But just to warn you, it won’t matter in the long run.”
I reluctantly came back to the chair and watched as his murky eyes studied me. For a moment, there was silence between us. I believe saw a touch of sadness or perhaps pity cross his face before he spoke.
“Some wars are fought for petty material things: land, resources, even technology. However, ours was a war of ideas, and as you have no doubt recorded, it is very difficult to conquer an idea. It cannot be done by blunt steel.”
“Nations in the World of Before saw this too,” I spoke with some anger, still inwardly fuming from the previous exchange. “It is no innovative thought.”
The Librarian chuckled, a throaty sound which made my hairs stand on end. “Regimes have used trifling measures in the past—oversight of information, guidance of the masses, speak truth until the truth is drowned. You can think of so many creative means and methods. All leaky. All imperfect. The ideas still come through. The city still falls in time.”
“I have read about such things,” I blurted in impatience. “Again, this is no surprise.”
The Librarian laughed again. “Then let us dispense with these pleasantries. History is the outcome of ideas. Time is merely the change of cultures. War is the shape of one culture into another. How then, to create perfection when the people abandon every idea? How then is Progress to survive when the concept history itself demands its fall?”
The Librarian paused and grinned wickedly. I could see the pride in his eyes. Even strapped to the hospital bed, he gleamed with animalistic pleasure. Somehow, I did not fault him for this; it was his great victory. It was his magnum opus. At that moment, the sickened part of me also delighted in this momentous achievement.
The bed-ridden man snapped his fingers, and the hospital room disappeared. We sat in an empty void. The bed was replaced with a wheelchair. He was sitting there, still in a blue hospital gown, his hands clutching at the armrests of the seat.
“If history cannot meet the demands of Progress, then history itself must be abolished.”
This is perhaps the greatest triumph of Progress, and I do not wish for you to be confused here. We do not speak in exaggerated hyperbole or meaningless philosophy. Progress, the city which knew no laws, could do exactly that. History implied a changing of ideas. A changing of ideas implied impermanence, and then doom would fall over Progress as any other nation. None other than God could secure against such a fate. How better to defend our future when our enemies no longer have the capacity to exist?
We should not hate the dissident with such fervor. It is history which facilitates his crimes and his passions. It is history which enables his terror upon our city. The past needed to be abolished before it could lay the seeds for our destruction. We must restructure all which came before for the sake of what can be.
I do not speak of this in mere cardboard recreations of the World of Before. I mean we eliminate the past, cutting the very fabric of space and time asunder to uplift ourselves. We fling the very notion of time into obscurity because nothing can come in the way of Progress. I spoke to you of how we remake our city again and again and how we doggedly chase better forms and minds.
I apologize, for I feel I did not convey the zeal of which this is done. Our very pasts and previous iterations are flung into the fires of nonexistence. We do such kindness to them because they keep us from perfection. They are a remnant of what once was—less than perfect. Truly, anything less than perfect must be done away with.
Our history is boring precisely because there is no history. There can never be any history. There is only the eternal Progress, shining and burning upon its mighty hill. Our city is always moving forward toward its glorious future.
You may question how I can convey these things to you if they do not exist. That is most likely what gave me away when I went to see The Librarian, for no one in Progress remembers him. It is a secret I will reveal in a later letter. For now, it is too dangerous for me to speak of such matters.
In the meantime, let me reveal to you another secret to satiate your appetite. As we sat there in the void, I asked The Librarian one final question. He was the man who had been set to safeguard the treasure of his own civilization, a watchful sentinel to protect that most precious gift handed down from generation to generation, a gift given freely and out of hope that it was not all in vain.
You may ask me of this gift, but you already know it. That gift is the past. All that remains is a monument to the dead and a blazing light for those to struggle into the future. It is every last remnant of those who have lived and died and suffered.
The Librarian was the final measure. Even as Progress tore down the foundations of time and space, the books had already been secured away. They were replicated and hidden by scientific measures beyond conventional understanding. They would’ve been the hope for a world other than Progress, a last arsenal given to those who wanted a different life and set to be guarded by the one man who could be trusted to ensure their survival. Why did The Librarian betray his most sacred duty?
He told me in a few simple words.
“The children never learned from it, anyway.”
You may have a few unkind words for Progress after what you have heard, but I think those words were a greater condemnation than any man could ever hope to bear.