Week 47, 2019
Education in the Imperial schools was not centered on learning as much as
it was conditioning.
Every citizen was taught that all good things flowed from the Empire,
whatever the individual had to be thankful for, no matter how small, including
their daily food and clean water, they
could look to the Empire and to the Emperor himself as its source.
The schools beat this perspective into the mind of every person, as the
hammer pounds a nail.
The teaching was reinforced at every level of Imperial education, both in
the secular schools, and through the religious observations of the Imperial Cult.
It brought unity to each and every world despite their distance from one
another.
The schools were the hammer, and the cult set the nail.
The people were taught to give thanks to the Empire even for the good
things that came from their own hands, the vegetables growing in their gardens,
a blanket they had quilted, they gave thanks to the Empire and to the Continuum
which undergirded it.
There was nothing that they possessed, or that they ever would possess
that did not flow from the Empire’s munificence.
The Continuum and its Empire were the source of all goodness and justice,
they controlled the destiny of every living being.
The first gift they gave to the individual was existence, it was selfhood.
Life in the Galactic Empire was like a woven tapestry, with the Continuum
dictating how every thread was stretched across the loom, integrating each strand
into the fabric of the whole.
The images were constantly changing, moving, developing, even the tiniest
detail of the lives of the citizens fed the hunger of the Collective.
The Imperial government was the loom, the Imperial schools and the cult
were the shuttlecock, and the Observers in the field were like the hands that
pulled the threads through.
The Empire controlled every aspect of home life for the family, how it was employed, whether or not they
would advance, how much they could save, how much food was on their table.
To resist the will of the Empire even in thought, was considered to be a
grave sin.
A person could not move from one dwelling to the next without Imperial
approval. The Empire kept families bound to a single domicile for generations,
only moving them if and when their rank changed, and that occurred only if it
served the interests of the Continuum, and the narratives it was developing.
This offered the ordinary citizens a sense of normalcy and reliability,
of safety and security, while stifling
virtually every bit of hope.
Even marriage was subject to Imperial approval. In most cases the Empire
did not exercise that control, but it did when it served the broader purpose of
the Continuum. A marriage proposal would be approved or denied at the temple,
“according to the will of the gods,” the Continuum and the Collective.
Procreation itself was tightly controlled.
For those with means, unsanctioned pregnancies could be terminated. Those
who were afraid to report to the Empire or who could not afford an abortion,
were forced to abandon their children among the outcasts and untouchables.
The social structure the Empire adhered to was designed by the Continuum
as a means of reflecting on the past, on the traditions of the Ancient People
who formed the Collective, who embarked on the great space-faring adventures
and whose colonies formed the Empire as it came to be.
Every citizen lived out their lives with the possibility of contemplating
only a very narrow band of possibilities for themselves and their families.
Hope itself was discouraged, but in that bleak landscape the most
powerful hopes would blossom, brightening the lives of the people like flower
blooming in the arctic.
Work and trades were
hereditary, they were guarded. Farmers farmed, builders built, and fishers
fished. From one generation to the next sons followed their fathers into work,
as daughters followed their mothers into the birthing chambers and lives of
drudgery.
They married and had children within their class and caste, within their
occupation, generation after generation.
Soldiers went to war, while priests officiated the sacred rites. The
gears of the social wheel turned predictably and only the rarest of individuals
even questioned it.
They people did not question the reality the were taught to believe, that
they belonged exactly where they
were.
Those rare individuals produced the drama that the Continuum hungered
for, they were the source of energy that fed the Collective, kept the membership
out of its malaise.
There was very little opportunity for an individual or a family to change
their inherited circumstances.
As oppressive as this system was, there was comfort in it. The vast
majority of the people merely persisted, got by, and did not question what the
gods had ordained for them.
Every person was beset by the intense pressure that came with the
understanding that their future was completely dependent on every little
decision they made in the here and now.
Citizens holding positions of power or authority required balance and
poise, the more responsibility they had the more heavily they were scrutinized.
Every person’s life was a matter of public record, every step they took
outside the home, every word they spoke. At any time they could held
accountable for anything…for everything they had ever done.
The Collective loved to see people and families built up, only to watch
them taken down, sometimes over the course of generations, at other time with
bewildering speed.
The Continuum gave them these dramas, filling the Collective with the
vicarious experiences they craved.
The greatest narratives the Continuum had ever constructed resulted in
the destruction of entire worlds, the suppression of rebellion that resulted in
total genocide.
The more power a person had the more careful they had to be. Billions of
lives depended on their thoughtful application of it.
Such was the case with El the High Priest.
His rebellion had destroyed everything he had ever loved. Then, after his
resurrection and his complete submission to Imperial rule, he held posts in
which he signed orders that starved quarrelsome population into submission.
He led the Imperial armada on missions that turned entire planets into
glowing cinders, sending their raw materials to the central system as an
offering to the Collective.
As High Priest El blessed these missions and absolved the commanders of any
and all crimes they and their troops committed in the furtherance of it.
Control requires ever greater
control; to force it is to lose it. In the Empire the exercise of power had to
be done submissively, always in deference to a greater authority..
It was dichotomous.
The Empire cultivated a sense of helplessness, routinely crushing any
sense of self esteem, while at the same bonding various groups of citizens
together, forging a sense of belonging among the trillions of citizens living
on a million worlds.
The ordinary citizen had no say in the destiny of their home-world, they
saw it as theirs, and themselves as belonging to it. For the pleb, every link
in the chain-of-being was a vital part of their culture and they had a duty to
defend it, both in thought and deed.
Their advancement depended on their fidelity.
In the abstract the concept had a quality of beauty, a social symmetry
and wholeness that the witnesses to it could not help but appreciate. In
reality, every link in the chain was an instrument of bondage, forged together
by lies and leading only to ruin.
The ordinary hopes and dreams of the people meant nothing to the
Continuum and the Collective, they were merely data-points in a grand drama
which they consumed vicariously, and hungered for with an insatiable appetite.
Any sense of control that an individual might feel was an illusion, fostered
for the sake of creating a narrative that leant meaning to the lives of the
Collective.
A person only had existential worth if they were noticed by the Collective,
but that was by no means a guarantee of happiness.
The ambitions of an entire planet could be burnt up and scattered like
cinders and ash, if it suited the will of the Collective.
No individual person or planet had inherent value.
The Continuum used the people while caring nothing at all for them, the
people in their turn placed their hopes in the Continuum, desiring nothing more
than to be elevated to the Collective and thereby to enter into eternal life.
The sacred rites functioned
like a dragnet, drawing everyone in, capturing them body and soul.
Every citizen was compelled to conform; the Empire would not accept
anything less than complete obedience. Attendance at the temple was mandatory.
Few people even attempted to resist, those that did were discovered and
subjected to advanced conditioning.
If the priesthood was unable to change the will of the deviant, they were
expelled, cast out, they became untouchable.
Conformation to the Imperial way was the focus of the Imperial schools as
well. Conditioning of the head reinforced the conditioning of the heart.
The schools provided an intellectual apparatus and frame of context for
the religious rites to fill.
The rites of the Imperial cult were grand ceremonies, both simple and
complex, they engaged the adherent at every level of their senses, they were
imbued with hypnotic power.
The Empire’s goal was to supplant every natural communal bond, the bonds
that every person formed instinctively with parents and siblings, with
neighbors and classmates, in their villages, in their cities, on their planet
of origin.
To condition to believe that there was freedom in bondage, and belonging
in alienation, that obedience was the path to transcendence, and self-actualization could only be had in
self-abnegation.
The deepest allegiance had to be to the Empire, and to the Continuum
beyond it, that allegiance was based on the promise of a reward that was rarely
given.
The priesthood used every device at its disposal, controlling the people
with music and movement, with mantras and mandalas, through their diet and with
drugs. They had honed their techniques over millions of years.
They never fully succeeded in this, and they never quit trying.
The most important thing the ordinary citizen required, both for their
prospects of advancement, and to simply keep their place, was access to the right schools, the right
priest in the right temple, or simply to have a relationship with their
immediate supervisor.
In order to advance a person needed an advocate.
People coveted access more than anything, as such every access point was
closely guarded. There were bureaucratic entanglements to negotiate and social
hurdles to climb.
The norms of the hierarchies had to be observed.
In the struggle to craft a meaningful life, to provide some comfort for
themselves or their families, everyone needed a hand up. They required
representation by those who were ahead of them in rank or above them in class
and caste.
The entire Empire was governed by systems of patronage and clientage.
To go anywhere a person needed access to authority, they needed access to
those able to grant a boon or advance their cause, this was the grand nexus for
the systemic corruption of the entire social order.
Nothing was free.
The limits to upward mobility were clear and near at hand. They could
only be understood in economic terms.
The economics of advancement were disturbing, unethical, but by and large
they were not illegal. It was not illegal to commit one’s child to a life of
servitude in your patron’s house, it was not considered unethical to do so if
it meant that another child could attend a better school.
Neither was it illegal to use your servants for whatever purpose you
intended, even risking their lives for your own purposes, no matter how mundane
or banal those purposes might be.
It was in that nexus that the people found their complicity in the
crushing of one another’s dreams.
Emergence 4.0
Part Seven, War
Chapter Forty-five, Possession
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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