Rejecting the world of machines

A dramatized depiction of political disillusionment

Imagine you are a soldier, looking towards no man’s land during daytime from a trench when a single unarmed enemy soldier, an orc, crosses the field. Your entire unit watches befuddled. Maybe he’s coming to negotiate? - one asks. And yet why is he waving no flag? Maybe he’s come to desert, the other asks? - And yet, his own army is still in full force and it seems weird that they’d allow such an open and flagrant desertion.

Then something bizarre happens. The man takes out wire cutters, and begins cutting and then displacing your barbed wire fortifications. One soldier aims to fire but the captain, with the seeming agreement of all other soldiers, screams at him to stop: “To shoot an unarmed man is dishonorable.” The soldier replies: “but he’s destroying our fortifications in preparation for a general assault!” Captain: “Still, to shoot an unarmed man, is dishonorable”. Flabbergasted, the soldier sighs “Fine”, drops his riffle and climbs across the trench towards the wire-cutter to fight him knife to knife. As soon as he does so, an enemy sniper shoots him straight through the head. Meanwhile our wire-cutter; laughs, takes time to piss on the corpse and then continues cutting.

Now you are outraged, you raise your rifle when suddenly, the captain points his pistol at you and once again screams. “To shoot an unarmed man is dishonorable, if you shoot him I’ll shoot you.” You look around for the support of your unit only to find them nodding along in perfect agreement with your captain’s words.

You respond:

“the man isn’t being honorable at all. He’s happily cutting wires in the full knowledge that your ‘honor’ prevents you from shooting him, while openly celebrating his sniper comrades’ willingness to murder anyone who attempts to stop him. And now our entire army, and the civilization it represents faces total and permanent destruction under people who have demonstrated no capacity for honor.” You feel like your protests are falling on deaf ears except they aren’t. Everyone can hear you and seems to understand you, they just aren’t moved by your pleas. In fact, you are pretty sure they hate you now, more than they could ever hate an enemy soldier.

At this point you begin to suspect something horrible. You always knew something was off, but chalked it up to having a slightly different moral code to everyone else. You figured you were just unusually utilitarian and well, every society can use some deontologists. And yet now you realize that something much darker has happened. Whatever process created the humans who now look at you with contempt, forgot to give them souls or make them into people. It created only mechanical machines programmed to emit pre-determined signals in response to a dictionary of possible stimuli. The relevant entry in the operating manual read, rule: Do not signal dishonor. Example of signaling dishonor: Shooting an unarmed man is dishonorable. And so the signaling machines followed their programming without any concern for their uniquely bizarre circumstance.

Your thoughts then turn to all your memories of life in the civilization that you had moments before been willing to die for. You smile as you remembered the moment at that party where that beautiful and sublime tune had possessed your body, making you feel that it was pulling you towards heaven itself. And then the speakers were blown; and the beautiful music that had just flowed through them moments before suddenly turned into horrid untuned screeches – only for the mob to continue dancing as if nothing at all had changed. Countless moments like it echo through your mind as you realize that whatever it was they heard and whatever it was they felt, couldn’t possibly be what you heard or what you felt. For if they had heard the beautiful tune you heard, they couldn’t possibly have confused it for the screeches that followed. And for that matter if they had ever felt the slightest bit of love for the civilization they pretend to care for, it would have mattered little that their internal glossary pattern-matched it’s defense to dishonor. But I guess the operating manual that said “dance to the music” didn’t specify that the music must be tuned, so their sensors detected a beat and the machines danced away.

Your mind returns to your present situation. It’s not obvious that your side won’t be able to win the upcoming battle even without any of it’s fortifications; your men remain very good shots. And yet you cannot shake the feeling now that it’s all for nothing now. You ask yourself:

Can I forget what I’ve seen?

Can I make myself forget what I know it means?

Somewhere behind the trenches is there someone, anyone, who can hear the music?

—

At The Futurist Right, I'll write for those who could only ever answer the first two questions with “No!”, and who desperately yearn for a world where the answer to question three is “Yes!” For beyond the cargo cult moralism, beyond the mindless repetition of slogans, and the loose word associations; lies something real; something worth defending, whatever the cost.