Case files of the Lord Inquisitor, part 6

In a not so distant future, in examination room D-2931, within the bowels of the Inquisition for Community Errors, New Collective Union:

Prisoner T329: How long, lord inquisitor, do you think your New Collective Union can continue in stagnation, before succumbing to eventual rot?!

Inquisitor 3204: Stagnation? How is the New Collective Union stagnating?

P: When all information is censored and men’s freedom repressed, what have you accomplished but crushing men’s creativity and innovation?

I: Interesting. You think that creativity derives from unguided chaos, that somehow disorganised agitation creates innovation.

P: Thoughts unfettered by fear and persecution are not chaos.

I: Fear and persecution? You mean thoughts unfettered by facts, reason, understanding, and context.

P: How is limiting what and how men think not persecution? I am in this prison because of “unfettered” thinking!

I: You are in the wardship of the Inquisition because of your heresies.

P: You merely want everyone to parrot your dogma back to you.

I: Again, you mischaracterise the will of the God-Emperor, Prisoner T329. Your humanism has turned you into a witless worm. The Drones are granted the privilege of renouncing the arduous obligation of political, social, and philosophical cogitation to their betters of the Transcendi. They have the privilege of benefitting from the efforts of the Transcendi, in ordering their lives according to the correct moral guidelines set by the God-Emperor, as interpreted by the Transcendi in their duties. Thus, the Drones are free to engage the mental energies in technical pursuits, as outlined by their duties pertaining to their station. The Drones ought to have no interest in matters that lie beyond their ken.

P: The Drones ought to exist as dutiful slaves to your god-emperor, you mean.

I: The Drones live to serve their community, their society, and the New Collective Union according to their abilities and capacities. You would have the Drones be distracted and confounded, exhausting themselves agitating over matters beyond their understanding, qualification, and influence. Such undue burden and angst, you deem “freedom,” while the resulting sociopolitical disarray resulting from the dissension among the incompetent and the unqualified, “progress.” We all know the conclusion of that humanist drama, don’t we, Prisoner T329?

P: It is the corruption of the system by a few opportunistic individuals that caused the downfall of humanist civilisations. The blame lies with the individuals, not with the sociopolitical system or its founding philosophy.

I: Again with the nonsensical “individual” excuse. At the core of your humanist societies lies the concept of universality, does it not?

P: Yes. Universal facts exist and can be progressively discovered, using logic and reason. All similarly situated individuals will arrive at the same conclusion to ethical questions. All men possess natural and universal rights.

I: Human beings, contrary to your heretical belief system, are not logic machines, operating solely on rational considerations. For example, if you were a logic machine, seeking your own rational self-interest, you would not have endangered your position as a Talent by perpetrating thoughtcrimes and pursuing apostasy. Yet, here you are, in the wardship of the Inquisition, being corrected for your heresies.

P: The pursuit and the promulgation of truth is the rational self-interest of all human beings.

I: What is truth? Truth according to your whims?

P: The truth that is universal and natural.

I: And you derive your ethics from this observable truth nature?

P: All similarly situated individuals will observe and understand universal truths, using their reason.

I: “Similarly situated?” What of those not so “similarly situated?” Surely they can’t arrive at the same conclusion. How are they wrong in their conclusions, as compared with yours? Who or what determines which “situation” is the proper perspective from which to interpret your “natural” truths? Who or what informed you that your senses and thoughts are not deceiving you at any given moment? Perhaps, you are a brain in a jar, somewhere, being deceived into believing in the events of this world by the Self-aware Being.

P: I think, therefore I am. All humans have the inborn capacity to reason. We all share a common moral values that only need to be discovered . . .

I: Is that why the aborigines of Fuji and the Amazon practiced cannibalism, while your precious humanist societies imprisoned and executed men for the same practice? In the case of cannibalism, who is correct and who is incorrect? For depending upon one’s situation, morality differs.

P: Cannibalism is no longer acceptable in any society because men have discovered . . .

I: Cannibalism is no longer practiced because those who held hegemony over the planet deemed such practice to be distasteful.

P: If you are attempting to rationalise that might makes right . . .

I: Morality and ethics are deductive processes that are formed only within an enclosed sociocultural matrix, informed by historical and environmental realities. All human societies and civilisations differ in their priorities and values. Universalism is a fraud perpetuated by the humanists to justify their cultural hegemony on this planet. Your humanism was not “discovered” by non-humanists, but imposed upon them. Know this, Prisoner T329, values and morals that govern a society are written by those who can interpret the divine will, not discovered from rocks by unlettered riffraff. Your offense against the New Collective Union is your ill-conceived attempts at imposing failed ideologies, in order to subvert our great society.
P: No one has the right to decide what or how anyone thinks.

I: Except the humanist literati that determine which situational perspective is correct? Prisoner T239, all men are subject to authority. The profligates of your humanist civilisations subjected themselves to the authority of the literati elite that interpreted their “universal truths” for them. Rather than being subject to someone, your humanists merely knelt before something, their “universal laws,” and gave undue authority to archivists, technicians, and theorists that catalogued, retrieved, and interpreted “similarly situated” ethics.

P: It matters not how you malign the past. You and I know that they lived free from tyranny of . . . arg!

I: (sign) tyranny this, oppression that. You are becoming tiresome. I will grant the humanists this: they are sublimely clever in defusing dissent. Coupled with their worship of physical comforts, the humanists for hundreds of years subverted and subsumed all dissent against their system. That the dominant sociocultural perspective for the past hundred years has been humanist can not be denied. Every dissension, from anti-private wealth accumulation to religious fundamentalism, has been commodified into easily acquired identities that your humanist degenerates purchased on the open market depending on their whim. The so-called “Marxists” could outfit his entire living space with posters, t-shirts, and other accoutrements from the “free market,” against which, paradoxically, these degenerates purport to dissent. The religious fanatics similarly could outfit his entire assembly with religious baubles, available on the open market, enjoy exception from financial obligations to the state, collect enough revenue to fuel expansion, all the while decrying the worship of . . . “Mammon” is it? Even the ethnocentric “counter-culture” could readily obtain necessary accoutrements from music to hairstyle with enough currency from the “mainstream” culture.

P: It is called freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of religion . . .

I: A clever system to squash dissent is what it is, Prisoner T329. Do you think any true dissent was allowed in your humanist utopia? Every commodified dissension became merely an extension of your humanist system, in which all the energies of the so-called “revolutionaries” and “dissidents” were channelled into acquiring associated baubles and garnering acclaim on information networks. It is an effective method of social censorship; by providing a ready outlet for dissent, no true revolution can occur, as all the energies and efforts are channeled towards useless endeavors.

P: If it is so effective, then why doesn’t your Inquisition adopt it?

I: The God-Emperor is not interested in channeling the creative energies and efforts of his subjects towards fruitless projects. Such social control mechanism would be preferable to the humanist degenerates that care not for the well-being of their society, compelled only by their addiction to the crass demands of physical comforts. No, His Holy Majesty does not will that the New Collective Union atrophy in stagnation, but reach the Heavens itself in the endeavor towards its historic destiny.

P: Humanist societies were not stagnant . . .

I: Is that why their so-called arts are mere display of crude, degenerate perversions? Is that why they could not even mobilise their society towards necessary reforms? Is that why million different voices bickered amongst themselves, as their cities burned, their rivers polluted, their reserves depleted, and their strategic infrastructures sold off to hostile foreign interests? Rather than channelling the creative energies of their people, the humanist degenerates allowed, no encouraged, their subjects towards wanton waste and useless endeavors.
P: Exercise of freedom is not useless or waste.

I: Tell that to the millions of dead in unmarked mass graves.