The Rise and Fall of Gloryland

A future history in fable

Long ago and far away, a beautiful country called Gloryland was founded upon a green and plentiful continent by pale people with a vision of equality and freedom. To prepare the land for this vision, they carefully removed all the dark people who lived there, and then brought in other dark people to do the actual building of Gloryland. None of these dark people consented to any of these actions, but the pale people just went ahead and did them, because, well, that’s what pale people did.

And yet the pale people believed so fervently in their ideals that after a few hundred years, they even began to consider extending them to the dark people, whom they were just beginning to recognize as also, possibly, people.

But before the idea really got going, a Great Evil arose across the sea and began to spread around the world. All the citizens of Gloryland, pale and dark, sacrificed to combat that Evil and vanquished it in a shining moment of true righteousness.

Returning home in moral triumph, the citizens of Gloryland produced a boom of babies that grew up to rule the globe. The boom of babies produced a boom of wonders, selling those wonders at a profit even to the defeated nations. The whole world wanted Gloryland stuff, Gloryland money, Gloryland stories. Why, the war against Great Evil paid off like a slot machine!

Gradually, the citizens stopped learning anything except how to make money (called “selling”), manage money (“finance”), or tell stories with money (“marketing” and “entertainment”). They lost interest in learning about science, history, religion, truth, or anything not directly related to their immediate gratification.

And just as Gloryland believed it had become the best of all worlds, a handful of dark foreigners committed a heinous criminal act right in its midst. So the leaders of Gloryland dubbed it another Great Evil, and called for massive retaliation against a nation of dark people. It wasn’t the nation the criminals actually came from, but the leaders told the citizens it did not matter. This Great Evil included all the nations who had never really liked Gloryland.

So another war began, because war remained profitable. But the citizens of Gloryland, now more ignorant than ever, did not understand this war, did not sacrifice in this war, and therefore had no personal stake in ending this war. When their interest flagged, the leaders caused to have magical pictures send tales of terror into their homes, filling the pale citizens’ hearts with horror at the wicked refusal of the Others to surrender to Gloryland.

Inevitably, Gloryland’s dislike of the foreign Others grew to include renewed dislike of the Others at home.

And the dislike grew into hatred.

And the hatred grew into terror, just as the pale leaders knew it would.

So the pale leaders played their trump card and proposed building a Great Wall around Gloryland, to keep any more Others from ever entering the country. That way, they knew they could control the nation and all its wealth and people. They prudently added Great Laws, too, so that Others could not come by air or sea.

The pale people of Gloryland were finally safe.

The success of the Great Wall and the Great Laws

The pale people congratulated themselves on having restored the glory of Gloryland, as it had been when they alone were in charge. Many dark people left, fearing the consequences to come. More went to jail, or disappeared, or died in the wars.

While some were still too polite to say so, many pale people were secretly glad to see the dark population dwindling. The Great Wall and the Great Laws had been a good solution, the pale people said. Everyone is more content when properly sorted, like with like.

Trouble in paradise

But over the years, cracks appeared in the veneer of Gloryland. Increasingly, essential work went undone — works of building and maintenance that had traditionally been performed mostly by immigrants and dark people.

The pale people of Gloryland grew older and sicker, but the dark people who used to tend them were gone. And their own pale children wouldn’t do it, either, because it was too hard. Sick people were so demanding.

Meanwhile, things were changing in the dark nations. Previously, the best and brightest people of the dark nations had left home in search of the promise of Gloryland, where too often physicians ended up as lab techs and professors drove taxis.

Now, with Gloryland off limits, the best and brightest stayed in their home countries and made great contributions there. The potential and the genius that had been suppressed, stolen, or exploited by the country of the pale people inspired a great unification the Others of the world. Education flourished; populations stabilized; innovations and alternative energy technologies made deserts bloom and made peace possible.

Convergence in the world

All the nations that had been subservient to Gloryland joined together, realizing that united they comprised a significant majority of people and land mass. Newly empowered, they made those majorities count.

The coalition saw that for years Gloryland had helped themselves to their natural resources after first raiding, colonizing, or co-opting the land and people. They saw that when they later had to buy Gloryland goods, they further crippled their own industrial infrastructures.

So they simply stopped trading with Gloryland. They traded only with nations that agreed not to bomb them, colonize them, or destroy their environment. After many initial struggles and hardships, trade was restructured on principles of mutual enlightened self-interest, and prosperity began slowly to emerge.

Contraction in Gloryland

Meanwhile, Gloryland continued to squander resources just as she had done when she could buy them cheaply from everybody else. By the time the citizens realized they were using up their own oil and coal and trees, it was too late —they were gone and couldn’t be retrieved. Oops, they said.

Jobs didn’t really work any more, so to speak, in Gloryland. There were lots of “wealth management” professionals around, but there was little wealth to manage. There were more creators and curators than qualified customers. Everyone had their own reality show, but no one’s television worked.

They had forgotten how to build or repair anything. Machines grew their corn and potatoes. So they ate corn and potatoes, until the machines broke down. No one was able to farm anything else except a few hipsters who grew kale. So corn and potatoes and kale.

The wars finally ended when the united dark people used weapons sold to them by Gloryland itself to strategically disable Gloryland’s vast but obsolete military. Gloryland’s forces had already been drastically weakened, with so few dark people left to volunteer. And calls for a draft failed when pale leaders realized that it would be their own children they would be drafting. The aggression finally stopped, and Gloryland contented itself with extravagant parades, until the budget finally ran out.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on…”

The Great Wall and the Great Laws marked the end of the era of the pale people and ushered in the renaissance of the dark people. After a few centuries of angry backlash against the pale people, who had always been a minority anyway, equilibrium returned. The retaliation abated and a newly confident, newly empowered global majority offered assistance and declarations of tolerance toward Gloryland and its few outlying allies.

Job retraining programs were provided to help pale people learn valuable skills for their changing world. Former finance, marketing, and film professionals were prepared for practical employment suitable for their station, such as truck farming, light manufacturing and repair, construction, maintenance, household management and budgeting, practical nursing, and animal husbandry.

Rehab programs were offered to help pale people who were suffering withdrawal from opioids and cell phones, since the towers no longer functioned, and computers, since there was no one to maintain the infrastructure.

All citizens were required to spend a year in public service sorting and cleaning up decades worth of accumulated garbage.

But then — A new challenge from space

Eventually, as the world was enjoying an era of relative peace and prosperity, the inevitable happened. Outer space explorers discovered the Gray People of Proxima Centauri b. The Centaurians, a humanoid race with three genders, had developed a peaceful and curious civilization with a love of music and board games. They were welcomed on Earth as interesting and useful curiosities and companions.

Gradually, the people of Earth realized that the Centaurians were exceptionally long-lived. Once established on earth, they remained for centuries, reproducing slowly but steadily and tipping the hard-won balance of population that earth had achieved.

Even worse, the people of earth, when exposed to the Centaurians, also began to live longer and longer. The world became overcrowded again. Life lost its charm for people who lived for 150, 200, 300 years. Anxiety, anomie, nihilism, and violence returned with a vengeance. Dark people and pale people alike reverted to the worst traits of humanity, as selfishness and greed and boredom triggered an endless individualistic search for acquisition and amusement. The nations of the world discovered again how wars could make them rich.

And here we go again.

Dark people and pale people alike turned upon the Centaurians and blamed them for their mounting unhappiness. They became an abomination; the new Great Evil among them.

It was the Gray People who were causing all the trouble. They were keeping the humans from entering heaven. They were stealing what was left of the resources of the planet. They had insinuated themselves into the society of true humans and disrupted the natural order of things. It was the Gray People who were the aliens, after all.

There was talk of building a wall.