The Trophy Wine

I wish I were able to more clearly understand what it was about humanity, the human race, which seemed to continually lead it into this unresolvable dead-end – that is, unresolvable apart from a mass destruction kind of event which altered the path of its history. No doubt of course, anyone who did not have the partially raised esoteric horizon view that had fallen to someone like Vera for instance, would say that there was no one externally interfering with the history of the human race, no Sodom and the ‘five cities of the plain,’ no actual ‘Atlantis’ – nothing like that at all.

Leader guy was once again, reading my thoughts quite precisely and gave me an answer before I needed to vocalise the question:

“Consider it this way,” he said. “Look at it just as a matter of the make-up of characteristic human psychology. On the one hand you think that competition and hierarchical power is simply a reflection of nature, and on one level that is so. Humans are animals, animals are animals – are animalistic.

“But unrestrainable personal appetites are in every way a true reflection of the reptilian kind of creature. Modern definitions about a very common word in modern politics – productivity – serve to hide with sophisticated econo-speak and mystical media language what has always been going on down here on a more sanguine level. Which is simply control of a slave population that is bled from and fed from. The definition in standard academia today is: ‘How much output for a given set of inputs.’ The productivity is the rising or falling metric to do with the variables of that equation. The concept of resource scarcity as a natural given constant of that equation glosses the ultimate factorial. Which is namely that whoever is extracting personal private value to themselves from the entire economy-wide dynamic – of that equation – is doing so by taking from the lowering ‘human unit of production’ number, aka from the people.

“They keep them at a controllable population level so that that group cannot overpower the rulers, but not so few that they are not able to be harvested from without deteriorating the herd.

“One does not need to resort to bizarre narratives and literary mythical devices - such as the putative reality of intergalactic space Alien dragons – to observe that entertaining this kind of very mundane political and social policy mindset such as I have just set forth is itself exactly like keeping crocodiles as pets in a household of other ordinary pets like cats and dogs and flightless birds. And even children being there in that environment too. It is like that. It’s exactly as dangerous as that.

“Unfortunately it would not matter if we handed over virtually free energy and other impressive technologies here because the socio-economic paradigm of say, the Star Trek so-called post scarcity economy is not applicable in a context where literally by deliberate intention and fundamental design someone with overwhelming existing political power always creates artificial scarcity and a power hierarchy which excludes the natural human being.”

“You’re saying these are not human beings who are in charge here.”

“Well they are not. They are very ugly, sinister, desperate creatures on their last Cosmic sociological legs so to speak, if you want to phrase it in such melodramatic metaphysical language. But they are not what human beings are, as the optimum social example of - a ‘human being.’

“They are the prime example of what an optimum human-like narcissistic animal might be though.

“Don’t forget, they are always taking from the pool of weaker beings, at no personal cost, with no philosophy of actual sharing with the weak pool. Not with power, not with things. The point of productivity is more output for less input. It is not more knowledge and more power and less effort to the weakened classes and with shared human values among all. That is of course, the Ursula Le Guin social ideal, which never is accepted in the mainstream either of politics certainly or of academia not even standard macro-psychology academia.

“And why is it not accepted? Because they are entertaining primal crocodiles of ego-serving appetite fulfilment ideals and ideologies as pets, intellectual pets if not real existential Draco Reptilian Aliens!”

And then he laughed.

“Because there’s no such things, right?” He said to me. “Is there.”

“Dunno. But if there is why can’t you just target them and exterminate them – for the benefit of Mankind?”

“You’ve heard of the Stockholm Syndrome... It’s a lot more long and winding of a process to undo what has been millennia in the doing.”

He picked up a glass of already poured Superblend, I think the 802A. One of the short-haired women (women? Yeah I guess women not just generically female beings) had poured his glass three-quarters full and left it there for him. They were good at attending to people, you could see that.

All of the rest of them, McKenzie the McLaren driver as well, were all messing around now in the living room area, on the couch, one on an individual chair with another of them I think -, it looked like he or she was massaging the sitting one’s feet.

You could see them laugh almost as a single group – a group laugh - every now and again. There was a strong scent of plumeria flowers so it seemed to me. And it wasn’t a left-over from the infused steam Dornbracht shower set-up. It was something like a scene I had witnessed and experienced a few times a long time ago in a Tamil sort of tantric practising community in South East Asia – not very far from Guy Savelli’s seminal training place as it happens. But this – both what I was seeing now and what I had seen previously - is not the way the modern idea in the West of Tantrism is generally delivered to people.

I can’t fully explain it. Not here.

It’s just different. That’s all. Or put it this way – it’s different is all you need to know right now.

...Ah well but okay now I could see where the scent was coming from – there was this small glass sprayer phial of ‘The Lover’s Tale’ that they were handing from one to the other. I knew the thing. Because Vera had a couple of bottles of it which she said she got on account of what one of them had told her. Apparently it reminded them of home or at any rate some kind of ritual or annual celebration thing they had back there.

“This is a backwater, John. This planet is very very far away from anything.”

MacGregor placed a hand inside his over-jacket, which had a double-breasted front-line, and withdrew a long slim wallet inside of which was a plain white folded sheet of card paper, with some lines drawn on it literally in old school naval charting pencil. And he even had such a pencil in his hand presumably that he had taken out in the same action of removing the wallet although I never saw him do it.

“Here. Look at this. This is an application of the Thales Intercept. And I am showing it to you so that you can make a whole lot of money out there in the human world presently.”

The lighting was growing even dimmer by the second now, and the people, beings, were all zoning out with whatever it was they were on, music, drugs, contact, presence, closeness, everything... But I was real interested in this. This bit of paper he was holding out in front of me.

“See? This depicts a river with its winding course. You are on one side – here.” He stabbed at the sheet with a long scrawny finger (he possessed all four of those plus a thumb like any normal human). “And then this here is the right hand corner of a large triangle whose top end, the apex, falls across the river on the other side – here.”

I looked up at his face because his eyes were looking at me, into my eyes now, transfixing me, rather than focussing down on the page.

“This is how Julius Caesar defeated Pompey crossing that small river one time and starting a great big war as a result.” And he chuckled, and literally winking at me as if I was supposed to know something personally about Caesar and that episode which I basically did not. I wasn’t even any kind of dedicated if even an amateur one -, student of history frankly.

“Well, you guys were probably there, being able to time travel and all of that, and I was certainly not.” I opined.

“Oh? Were you not though?” He blandly remarked.

I shrugged. No idea at all what he was trying to say.