The planet Zorb was populated by human-like creatures. It was about as advanced as Earth was in the 1700s. People got along with each other and traded goods. There was some pain and strife, but much joy and fellowship, too.
Gant, an advanced being from another planet, watched over the planet Zorb. Gant had an intergalactic megaphone and he pointed it towards Zorb and spoke into it, and then watched the response of the human-like creatures. It turns out that the creatures thought Gant was their God speaking to them -- and that whatever Gant said over that megaphone would be instantaneously believed by the human-like creatures of Zorb. Because of this predicament, the megaphone was more like a dictaphone. Gant decided to go ahead and to fiddle with the belief-structures of the people of Zorb, in order to see what kind of results you'd get after altering what kinds of ideas the people have or hold dear. He said:
Knowledge is fallible. And everybody of Zorb stopped what they were doing and looked up at the sky in amazement. Here is a string of thoughts that followed, intermingled with changes in the way that the people of Zorb interacted with each other:
Wait a minute, if knowledge is fallible then everything is insecure -- even the previous way that I have been living.
There is nothing!
If knowledge is fallible, then there is really no hope for things like justice or security, because all that it is that we now have, could change in an instant from nothing other than a fickle change in other peoples' emotions.
There is nothing!
Holy crap, this means I'm unsafe, not just from known enemies, but from potentially anyone -- what I have got to do now is band together with others and form a pressure-group, a "gang" if you will, and prepare for gang warfare. There is no right answer, so I will have to culminate in-group loyalty and out-group hostility in order to get my wants and desires met (as I cannot count on earning them inside of a system of justice for productive citizens, since such a system is on such shaky ground because it cannot be known to be good, because nothing can be known to be good).
There is nothing!
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! What do I feel like? C'mon, c'mon, I've got to figure out what I feel like and then act on my feelings (because knowledge is impossible). What am I scared of?
I'm scared of guns. I have to organize a pressure group in order to ban guns.
I'm scared of bankruptcy. I have to get into bed with the government and convince them to call me "too big to fail."
I hate greedy people. Maybe we should put them into a concentration camp or something.
Nah, that'd be mean. But if a charismatic dictator wanted to put greedy people into a concentration camp or something, then who am I to judge? There is no right answer, and I'll just get my head lopped off for speaking up about it. That's it. If a charismatic dictator decides to put greedy people into a concentration camp or something -- or simply extend and stretch a law that says he can arrest us without a proper warrant -- then I am just going to sit by and I will do and say nothing about it.
There's no right answer anyway and everything -- everything -- is nothing other than a simple power struggle, just like it is in the jungle.
Living as a Zorbian person is not any safer or better than living as a lower animal in the jungle -- all animals, me included, are in the same, dog-eat-dog predicament.
We have to devour each other, there is no other way.
Gant watched the people of Zorb go from being a peaceful and advancing society to one in which pressure groups devoured each other -- just from believing in a 3-word sentence.
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