Outside the gates of the Institute, unregulated humans were milling around pointlessly – as they very much tend to. They have lost the meaning of their lives, you see – they don’t know what they stand for any more. A wild looking man with an overabundance of pale wispy hair and protuberant eyes that practically stood out on stalks was gyrating unsteadily and frequently falling over. A mocking crowd had gathered to watch him. He was shouting out at the top of his voice; he was shouting out the words that we all know so well. It was all he knew how to do of course – he’d run out of options. As do we all in the end.
Shouting out the words that we all know so well, the Credo of Unconditional Conformity – “I will believe what everyone else believes, no matter how dumb that might be, no matter how atrociously crass and banal it might be, no matter how offensively stupid and brutally counterproductive it might be…”
“History is what history does”, I uttered wisely, speaking to the thermostat on the wall. The thermostat was intelligent – it knew things. How it knew things I don’t know, but it did. It possessed mystical knowledge. It knew things I had never heard of. “Mystical knowledge come to my aid!” I cried out, full of inane excitement, but none did. That’s the story of my life really. Nothing new there. The thermostat was ignoring me – it considered me a lower life form and it had no time for me. I was less than a microbe to it and so it simply couldn’t be bothered humouring me anymore. It considered me a fool. My intelligence quotient was much too low for it to be able to relate to me. The sad truth is that as household appliances have grown smarter over the years, we humans have degenerated into out-and-out idiocy.
All right-thinking humans will repeat the Credo when things become confusing – it’s the tried and trusted remedy, provided to us by our honoured forefathers. This is their legacy. It’s important to honour our forefathers for without their incorrigible stupidity – which they went to great trouble to pass on to us – where would we be? How would we hope to cope when difficult situations come along? Belief is the key thing my friends – take it from me. Take it from one who knows. It doesn’t matter how laughably dumb your belief might be just as long as you keep on repeating it yourselves over and over again. Your belief will see you through and that’s all that really matters in the end.
Shouting out the words, shouting out the words that we all know so well. Shouting out the words that were beaten into us as such an early age. Savagely beaten into us. Roaring and shouting, yelling out those time honoured words as a way of beating down the opposition. The more confused we get the more we roar and shout. As was ever the way of course. Some formulae are simply too effective for us to dispense with – the old ways are always the good ways, as all right-thinking people will agree.
There’s no room for the unregulated humans anymore – the Institute is everything, the Institute is everywhere. It’s in our heads and we can never run away from it. All right-thinking humans will see this is a good thing – a most splendid and marvellous thing. We will spend our days telling ourselves how lucky we are, how very fortunate we are. The Institute has no gates anymore – there’s no way out. Inside the institute the machines tell us what to do. They patiently instruct us on how to live our lives. The machines always know best after all and we would be well advised to listen to them. The machines always know best and they will always tell us the right thing to do.
