FREEDOM'S STORY'S SECOND PART
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
FREEDOM’S STORY’S SECOND PART
by Adam Carroll Draper
Last week’s missive was the first part’s plot of my completely fictional story of a country named Freedom on a planet called Orbis. Today I continue the outline into its sad, second part - a tale of the indentured servitude of a people who considered themselves free. Again, I am thinking of writing the story out, but I haven’t decided if it is a tale worth telling.
PART II
Freedom’s economic system had been developed by the Grinch to serve the Grinch, but they still called it freedom. Freedom’s money was a fiction created by the Grinch using vast computers so that the actual amount of currency in existence was as theoretical as the fiction that created it. The debt to the Grinch, however, was all too real. The people of Freedom simply accepted this computer-generated fiction as currency and lived their entire lives around getting as much of it as they could.
The wars on Orbis were fought with Grinch currency and for Grinch currency. In fact, all the nations of Orbis had their own version of this fictitious currency. Every nation on Orbis had its own national bank that generated that nation’s currency, but the Grinch determined who controlled the national banks. It was so perfect. The people in each country believed that their governments controlled their national banks, but each national bank was merely a consortium of banks owned by the Grinch. There were 150 countries (give or take) at any given time on Orbis. Each of those countries had a national bank that was run by a board of directors. Each board of directors had something like 20 members, so there were theoretically around 3,000 director’s chairs in total for all these national banks. The funny thing was that the same 250 to 300 people sat as the directors of all the national banks. All those directors worked for the Grinch.
All the national banks used one currency as the basis for setting the value of their own – that was Freedom’s currency (called the “Fiat”). Freedom had been so rich and powerful for so long that everyone just accepted that the Fiat would always be used everywhere. As long as people accepted the Fiat, the system worked, and the Grinch and Freedom got richer and richer. Over time, the Grinch started generated a seemingly limitless supply of Fiats while insisting that each Fiat maintained its same value (i.e. that inflation was as fictional as the currency). Eventually, the rest of Orbis (particularly governments) caught on to this and started preparing for war against Freedom to break out of the Grinch’s economic system, which was enforced by Freedom’s military. Most of the people of Freedom had no clue that any of this was going on, and they would not listen to those who did. They only knew what they were told by the Grinch’s news, education, and entertainment providers.
Through its monetary system and the placement of its denizens in the most honored positions of Orbis’ educational system and think tanks, the Grinch had carefully inculcated a school of thought accepting thr Grinch’s vision of the new order for Orbis. This school of thought had been so ingrained in the thought pattern of Orbis’ governing class that most of the nations of Orbis had agreed to a system of rules that gave the Grinch control of Orbis’ entire economy through the a series of agreements and treaties. The Grinch was so close. If things went to according to plan, nations themselves (including Freedom) would soon be relics as quaint and forgotten as the untaught, ancient history that had cautioned the people of Orbis to avoid currency wars (a history which was well known by those who had created Freedom’s own legal system and designed it to try to avoid currency wars).
Things had not been adding up for a while for the people of Freedom, however. In fact, a sense of unease was growing because far more people than the Grinch had foreseen were beginning to understand that things were not as they seemed. Worse than that, for the Grinch, the people of Orbis as a whole had long since suspected the Grinch’s careful narrative. Just as the Grinch was trying to consolidate power to make all of Orbis look like an approximation of Freedom, it looked like this new order for Orbis might fail.
Most people in Freedom had no idea that the Grinch existed, much less that the Grinch hated them. In fact, the people of Freedom were taught to ridicule the very notion of the Grinch. The bounds of credulity had been exceeded, however. Those narrating the Grinch’s careful fiction had become so accustomed to convincing the people to accept whatever story they told, that the narrators simply assumed that blatant lies and obvious fabrications would be accepted as truth as long as the money held out. However, it was becoming impossible to convince the people of Freedom to deny the fact that the rest of Orbis no longer trusted the Fiat, and the economy might collapse. Truth was beginning to break the Grinch’s horribly effective alternate reality.
Just as the Grinch thought all of Orbis was coming under its control, something happened. All over the world, annoying jerks started calling attention to the Grinch - and the Grinch seemed unable to ridicule them into oblivion or to otherwise silence them. In various places, these annoying jerks were revealing the danger of letting the Grinch create international bodies that controlled Orbis’ economy and all nations. The Grinch responded in all the media, regardless of political bent (for the Grinch owned anything primarily seen or read), by attacking these annoying jerks at all times, day and night. They were nationalist jerks, untutored by the Grinch’s rules, unsavory rubes - morons!
No matter what the Grinch did, people started listening to the annoying jerks. The carefully constructed reality that had controlled public discourse and kept people working for Fiats for generations was coming undone. The Grinch could not and would not tolerate this. The idea that people could govern themselves and truly live freely, apart from the benignant tutelage of the Grinch, was laughable. The Grinch had long since proven that freedom is a farce offered to people as a drug to allow them to keep consuming, and that people are first and foremost consumers, placated to grunt and sweat for Fiats so they can keep consuming. If they ever started to realize this, the Grinch would have to change the reality, particularly in Freedom. As always, reality could be changed by total war, engulfing all of Orbis, not just the middling kind Freedom waged in various spots already.
The Grinch loved war, the bigger the better. So Freedom and all of Orbis were at the brink of planet-wide war because of annoying jerks. If you really looked at it, however, you couldn’t really tell if the annoying jerks were pushed forward into the consciousness of Orbis by the Grinch or deliberately tolerated as a means to an end. That thought was unnerving, even to those who saw through the Grinch all along. One thought gave hope to those who could see: it was quite clear that the Grinch detested these annoying jerks and used all its power to stop them - and that there seemed little that the Grinch could do to keep the annoying jerks from getting elected. The annoying jerks did not accept that a planet-wide war was to the advantage of their own people. Such a war would cripple Orbis’ and set the stage for all nations to give up their individual currencies and accept one, controlled and issued by the Grinch.
The Grinch was so, so close. Something had to be done about the annoying jerks and their annoying nationalism.
Of course, this is just a story. Probably not worth writing! Shakespeare was certainly right about its author, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
If you got anything out of this missive, please give it a thumbs up, comment and/or share it. It helps.. I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to read this.