The Left-Chested Men

Once upon a time there was a tyrant/aspiring tyrant His power waxed and waned, but what he had he used relentlessly for the acquisition of more power.  His two great skills were this–he had, at times, a great deal of control over what was taught in the schools and put out over the media of mass transmission, and he and all his servitors were remarkably good at fencing.  This was a fencing, dueling people, so perhaps that was not so unusual, but even by the standards of this people he and his minions were good at it.  In particular, they were known for their deadly snap lunge-and-thrusts.

Which last skill would have been more useful if the people of that place were not also accustomed to wearing chestplates and armor.  Wonderfully light, wonderfully curved, the armor would make a good rapier rhrust skitter right off of it.

It so happened, however, that many years ago at a time when the tyrant had particularly strong grip over the schools and the tranmission of cultural information, he had put out, over and over, the virtue of left-chestedness.

Left-chestedness was an interesting virtue that combined savoir faire, ‘cool,’ unflappability, and strength and sword skill, but in practice and in the tangible world the way this virtue manifested was having a hole in your armor over your left chest.

Left-chested heroes in the movies were just so cool.

Nearly everybody started small–let’s not be crazy–but some people got more and more left-chested over time.  Why be less virtuous after all?  Plenty of ordinary people still only went around with small holes in their left chests and rolled their eyes or even angrily condemned those impractical ideologues who were almost uncovered on the left side,  and there were writers and intellectuals who were also of their persuasion and wrote learned discourses on why it wouldn’t do to be too left-chested–but all these people tended to be ineffective because, after all, they felt themselves to be arguing against virtue.

Left-chestedness was not directly associated with the tyrant–it had achieved the status of just being out there, one of those things, in the air–and even the tyrant’s most determined foes would grudgingly admit that despite being almost thoroughly a blackened soul he was at least good on left-chestedness and in fact had to grudgingly be credited with being an early adopter, though they rejected the slur spread by his supporters that he invented left-chestedness and that before the tyrant introduced it, their entire history as a people was suspect as being almost entirely un-leftchested.

One downside of leftchestedness–but this was partly also why it was so cool–was that if the tyrant or his minions got wind of a guy as an opponent of theirs, the leftchestedness made the guy easier to kill in a duel with a lunge and a thrust, and the greater the leftchestedness the easier the kill.  This was why, even though they were ashemed of themselves for their lack of virtue, there remained a significant faction of moderate or even minimal leftchesters.

Though there were plenty of leftchesters who hated and opposed the tyrant, it was notable over time how those who worked with and profited from the tyrant tended to become more and more leftchested, and those who were very leftchested, and thus more vulnerable to death if the tyrant went after them, tended to start working with and profiting from the tyrant.

After decades had passed and the original leftchested generations were grown old, the state of the people was as described but also with the surprising result that despite being leftchested–a virtue, after all, of devil-may-care fearlessness–the people were the most servile and afraid of giving offense, particularly towards the tyrant, that they ever had been.

Without ceasing to be altogether leftchested in practice–the tyrants minions tended to gang up on anyone so vile and extreme as to not have any holes in their left chest plate at all, and the public was ok with those extremeists being ganged up on, as it was felt that the rules of duelling and fair fights were for decent people only–the rising generation tended to mock and even reject the value of leftchestedness and in some minority of cases even edged towards having much smaller holes in the left chest.

They had intense discussions about where, if not on the left chest, the holes in the armor should be.

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Postscript–this probably reads as a political parable but that was not exactly what I had in mind when I wrote it.  In particular I picked the left chest only because that is where the heart is.