What if it went away, T.O.G.?

[Richter]

If it went away, we'd all go real BAD for awhile.  A panicked couple hours screaming about.  Oil and water shaken up, hundreds of different varieties trying to find each other at the proper level and density.  You'd get a lot of people changing their viscosity just to get along. 

We'd see some weird, if it went away.  People begging and pleading for order and rationality.  Just be calm, line up, and the Red Cross can give a cup of gruel to everyone.  Celebrity performers would be brought along to entertain as placation, and the aid workers would trot the AIDS Quilt or other meaningless talismans of the old charitable order before them like it was the Ark or John the Baptist's Hand.  "No one would DARE attack it."  We cannot fathom the levels of strange desperation that will be sunk to.  Pleas and relics will mean nothing the moment one person decides they need more than that one cup, and clubs the guy in front of them to get it.  Too little, too late, too bad.  It's ON now, and the only way you'll get away with it is making sure it stays on.

There'd be casualties.  Wrong place, wrong time, got something, got nothing, look like lunch, sorry buddy, you're gone.  It'd be bad luck, but the people who care about things being "fair" just went away too when it went away.

Begin to organize again.  Or, maybe you carry around for awhile.  Years, decades, roll with the horde, take what you need and roll on.  It keeps you going so it's easy to rationalize.  (As long as US helps you, you stick with the US, when the US doesn't serve ME, then things get tense.)  You keep rolling, you die off, or you try to slow down that crazy horde momentum and be not horde.  (A trick on par with jumping out of a car at highway speeds.)

Maybe you settle, maybe with other people for ease and defense.  Weird, very different now.  "Community" is no longer just a word that gets trotted out when the city cuts the budget and expects volunteers to clean a park up.  Community is everyone else around you who helps you maintain that grip on food, shelter and warmth.  The smaller the community, the more hardscrabble the conditions, the clearer that gets.  Loose one doctor, one weaver, one smith, or one strong back, you're suddenly got a problem.  Getting bigger makes this less likely to happen, but gives more space for a few extra parasites.  Leaches on any system are the first form of conspicuous consumption. 

What went away?  Doesn't matter.  Might be the water, the gasoline, the electricity, the communication system.  Long, fragile, Spider^TM silk threads holding things the way they are out of the pit. 

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The way I feel these days, I kinda hope all this happens.

I am a deep well of bitterness, even deeper than before, and I honestly don't give a fuck what happens to the monkeys when it all drops in the pot. I used to make certain exceptions to this, before I realized that a "friend" is just someone who hasn't found, seen, or manufactured a reason to throw you under the bus yet.

Casualties happen, Richter...Smilin' Joe Stalin said it best:  "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic."

The fact that the monkeys are all doing it to themselves for the very same reasons that I hate them just adds a little hilarity to it.  Monkeys will bite you for the crime of helping them, or being there when they need you, or just plain being there, for that matter.  This is why they do the sorts of things that ensure that your direst predictions are probably really rose-tinted Pollyanna bullshit...ie, foolishly optimistic.

The humans were given good examples, and loads of good advice. 

They didn't listen then, and they won't listen now.   

[Richter]

I blame the cause Roger.
The cause is so removed from the effect these days, and some of them never think beyond the immediate reward / punishment level.  Make it obtuse or distant enough and they'll make a religion out of it, but it's still real and close enough for any properly trained rat to grasp.

Fuck around today, you'll have to pay it back tomorrow.  Don't pay it back and all of a sudden the bill man, the policeman, and who knows who else come looking for it, and they act surprised.  They could see it all coming, but simply they choose not to spin their brains up fast enough to get a grasp on it.

Or there's a governor on those biological thinking engines of theirs.  The brains are bitched by ignorance.  People can be taught to foresight, analysis, or critical reasoning, but some never get there.  Maybe when public ed started getting cut they expected a more easily controlled populace, but I bet they never expected a populace that had trouble playing the game PERIOD. 

Beyond hippy garbage, as long as we're in the same boat, no matter how big or how hazy it is, everything that isn't pitching in to keeping it afloat is only fucking up the pumps, gnawing holes in the hull, or pissing the bilge a little more full. 
"WHAT THE FUCK?", they complain, as I certainly complain when some other bilge rat decides to take a bite out of my perch. 
"Hah, gotcha.", they say, and scuttle off happy with their mouthful.  Why shouldn't they go and get theirs? 
I guess they never bothered to see the bilge water rising.  I guess they forgot about the rain pounding down on the roof, or the storm raging outside.  Maybe their senses aren't long enough to realize.  I'm lucky though, I can pick up and leave if I decide I don't like my fellow rat, or if the water gets too high.  It's easy for me to do, but part of that would involve admiting defeat.  So would finding that rat bastard chewing on my shit and drowning him in the bilge.  Every rat we have to give up on and throw out or drown is another rat we're admitting is a waste, a rat made wrong, who couldn't be right.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

As God is my witness, I can't improve on that.

[Richter]

Just more impotent "good" ideas.  The last bit was so optimistic of me I could spew.

They will not gratify us by breaking down, they will not gladden us by getting better.

[Captain Utopia]

Richter, why should I become a better rat?  See, I have everything I need right here.  What does enlightenment offer more than a freezing cold beer and a weekend game during which to ignore my family?  Hard work and troubling thoughts to give me headaches and raise my blood pressure even higher?

Used to be you could build a city atop a dream and promise flitting around every corner.  Used to be you could demonstrate a better life, if not for yourself then for your children.  This didn't require magic imagineers, just shitfuck conditions, intolerable abuses and word-of-mouth.

But our abuses all became tolerable Richter.  This is the evil-twin of progress - just as hot, and really - what else matters?  We've peaked, and there's nowhere left to go but down.  Oh we still search for dreams, but none capture our imagination.  Is it surprising, then, that we have no direction.  What things do we, as a species, ever hope to accomplish?  Find a good answer for that question Richter, and you may one day yet set foot in that shining city on a hill.

[Richter]

Why should you be a better rat?  I have no damn idea.  Your own motivation is your own problem.  Unless I have a bag of psychotropics, a cattle prod, a locked room, and a signed carte blanche from every deity ever dreamed up (no your high priest or parents cannot sign for you.), I'm not doing it.  (Thou shalt not mutilate the spirit.)  Do not shit in my cheerios on my own path though. 

Why should I be a better rat?  I have my reasons.  See, no one has ever been this delusion I have called "Perfect".  A lot of other rats talk about this delusion too.  Everyone thinks it's different, but as long as everyone thinks things could be better, we've got a goal.  So long as I have this delusion, I have the Rage, the anger at everything that gets done wrong by the other apes.  If it craps on them, it craps on me by default, even if I can't see it immediately.  A step back to take two forward?  Fine, you need to back away sometimes.  This doesn't condone massacring each other with wholesale explosives and cheap Kalishnakovs.  This doesn't involve bombing schoolchildren in the name of your spectral boogeyman who just HAPPENS to want you to win that centuries old territory struggle.  This doesn't involve beating your mate, neglecting your offspring, pumping your body full of cheap brainburners, stealing to support a habit, breeding out of control, or fucking anything that moves because of your own insecurities. 

Here's the thing, I will never be this "Perfect".  In fact I hope no on ever is.  It's the drive and the wanting to keep improving and developing that keeps us in this world.  If we loose it then we're herd animals, moss, plankton, buddha, or one of a hundred other names for FOOD.  Even if I am not perfect, I will live, write about, and disscuss as much of getting towards it as I can.  It's worked so far, and it's keeping things on the up and up.  Could something gank us all by bad luck on the way?  Yup, and likely, eventually it will.  Something has to stop us, if not ourselves.  If anyone thinks this is worth giving up over, fine.  Ozymandias' works may be dust, but they sure as hell never said: "It's pointless.  I stopped."  Go off and graze quietly. 

City on a Hill?  Dr. Seuss wrote about one of those, and it was a troubled place too.  His moral was to take out your troubles, to accept personal responsibility for improving your own condition.  I hope I never settle in a city on a hill, becasue that will be admiting, "I am good ENOUGH."

[Captain Utopia]

We live in a universe of opposition, where the void defines that which it touches.  Create an "issue" and immediately oppositional forces will be apparent - what one lacks in relative numbers it will make up for in the volume at which it broadcasts its own special brand of insanity.  We rats run the decks of the ship, trying to keep it balanced in the water.  Our ideas of perfection most strongly resemble the status quo of yesterday, and while we flock hopefully to opposite sides, we keep steadily sinking.

An undefined "things could be better" is a different goal to every mind it touches, as a species the only destination it provides is perpendicular to the surface containing of all our desires - at the bottom of the ocean.  Geometrically speaking, this is normal.  One speaks in tongues of left, another in tongues of right, all would agree in a second, if they could see a way to go "up".

You call it perfection, I call it a city on a hill, and you're right.. nothing will ever set foot in that mirage.  I know things could be better, but without a motivation we can agree upon, something which provides both a direction and hope, we're going nowhere.

I look around the city and I have to blink and force myself to remember that all the wonders of constructed architecture and computers which now help design them, are the products of a monkey barely capable of wiping its own ass - you don't want to imagine what would happen if the 'it' which went away was toilet paper.  But since we are the most advanced civilisation we can contemplate, the illusion - that only little tweaks and adjustments are required to keep us at an even keel - is complete.

So your motivation is my problem, as much as mine is yours.. this is the battlefield we play upon, and so far the only winners are the buzzards of the 24 hour news cycle.