Abinadi and Blood Aristocracy

I had two dreams.  One about Abinadi and the other about a bloodline aristocracy.

IT Abinadi

OK, last night.

It was boring because it was basically the story of Abinadi with Amulek added and semi-set in the modern day.

This guy Abinadi comes into what looks like a city council meeting full of Americans except they are all wearing loincloths and stuff.  Abinadi doesn’t have prophet hair or a jacked body, he’s just some middle-aged guy.  He tells the city council that some big deal they’ve done with the Chinese is fraudulent and the Chinese are using it to penetrate all their systems.  Abinadi is apparently an IT guy because the presentation is focused on IT.  King Noah the mayor or what not is a big burly stupid guy with piggy eyes and a loincloth and feathers and he gets mad and starts screaming at Abinadi and comes out and starts slapping him so Abinadi yields the speakers position and retreats to the back of the room.  Then a local who is apparently friends with the Abinadi-type–this is a typical modern America mixed ethnicity setting so the local looks like he is maybe Hispanic–comes up to speak and voices his concerns about the Chinese contract.  Mayor Noah really loses it now and is actually kicking Amulek–which is easy to do because Amulek did his speech kneeling and prostrate to show respect.  Abinadi and Amulek flee.  Then Abinadi sneaks back once he’s apparently ditched Amulek, because Amulek was in more danger than he was?  And he starts going through the facts and figures with the city council.  (The mayor is still wearing a loincloth but now also has a blue dress shirt on).  “And then on October 8 we can document eight different downloads of a product from the Chinese contact . . .”  It goes on like this for awhile and I’m telling my brain this is boring stop stop I already know the story of Abinadi but it keeps going on.  To the point where I start wondering about the efficacy of Abinadi’s approach just to have something to think about.  He is pretty dry, maybe he should try appealing to Mayor Noah’s ego by talking about how the Chinese are trying to take advantage of him and play him for the fool.  Then finally piggy-faced Mayor Noah starts making horrible faces at Abinadi as Abinadi goes on and then blessedly I woke up.

Bloodline Aristocracy

Yesterday afternoon, daydreaming.

There’s this setting where a minority of people are faster, stronger, and smarter partly through hereditary but mostly because they have something special in their blood.  Magic woowoo, midichlorians, nanites, whatever.  But those are hereditary too, they are passed down somehow from the mother and father as a natural part of conception and reproduction.  Some lineages of the woowoo are better than others.  The natural result is an aristocratic society, with great noble clans and minor noble clans and lots and lots of commoners.  The woowoo also allows the aristocrats to wear giant golems or mechs or massive magically animated armor–my dream was surprisingly blase about this, just pick an option it doesn’t matter was its attitude– or whatever that allow them to run around swinging giant swords and knocking over trees and generally being awesome.

Of course it probably sucks some for the commoners.  Not that the aristocrats are all that bad or anything, but when an aristocrat in his giant golem accidentally squishes your hut, maybe you get compensation . . . eventually . . . or maybe not.

There is a way that an aristocrat can transmit woo to a commoner.  It is gross–it involves swapping blood and snot and spit–and complicated and time-consuming and highly illegal.

In this land an equality movement has arisen.  It’s a classic ideological revolutionary movement of the kind we are all familiar with that is using hit and run guerilla tactics but also protests and propaganda and ideological fervor.  It is making converts among both the commoners and a few aristocrats here and there.  They say that everyone should have woo, and they are sharing it among themselves.

The dream speedran through all of that, its basically all background.  The real part starts here.

There is a big hunt, a large group of aristocrats are having a blast at someone’s country place, then food and fun and all of that, but late in the evening a crowd of them end up in the large library sitting around talking about what to do about the revolution.  It is largely but not exclusively a gathering of one extremely important clan.  Its not a formal meeting but this is basically how aristocrats make decisions.

The bluff types speak first and their advice is simply.  We should crush them.  It is right for us to be nobles and them to be commoners.  Anything else is wrong.  No more pussyfooting around, lets crush them.  They discuss different tactics.

There is a young man lounging to one side.  He is a count, not just a younger son or a heir.  He wrenches the conversation away from tactics, with scorn.  “How do you aim to crush an idea?  We can win, maybe, if we are smart about it.  But we cannot win completely.  The idea and the movement will still be there.  It will spring out again and again.  We have to win every single time.  They only have to win once.”  The bluff guys argue some but they know the count’s reputation for being extremely clever, so they eventually subside.

Then a couple of older men known for their wisdom take up the argument.  Equality is a myth, they say, and commoners acquiring woo is a disaster.  Woo is dangerous.  The potency is an extremely heady feeling.  Almost literally, their is this buzzing expansive feeling you get when you first acquire woo.  But also it makes you feel extremely powerful and it makes you feel awesome when you are exercising that power.  The aristocratic bloodlines through the centuries have partly been able to acquire genetics that work well with woo, as the ones who go crazy and can’t handle it have slowly been weeded out.  The commoners have not had this experience.  Just as importantly, the clans have a massive apparatus of family and aristocratic training and tradition, the time for practice and education, the ties of responsibility to their lessors.  All of these are necessary to keep the woo in check and functional.  Without them the fuzzy ebullient feeling of woo turns people into megalomaniacs who indulge their passions wildly and the logic of the race to the bottom turns society into an anarchy of all against all.  People can be awful and left out there with dangerous powers, the awfulness will predominate.  The only solution, besides suppressing the revolutionary movement now, is to educate the commoners more extensively on the long term risks and dangers of woo and let their common sense prevail.

Besides, chimes in another, our disgust at the process of transferring woo should not be discounted.  Natural disgust is meaningful.

I quite agree with nearly all that you’ve said, the young man replies.  Equality is a myth.  Not a lie, but a myth.  Woo is as dangerous as you say, and only somewhat safe for us for exactly the reasons you have said.

In fact, you have left off some of the best evidence for you point of view.  In any other gathering, I would say it was from fear that it was left unsaid.  (There is some commotion, the count runs over it).  The neighboring land was once like unto ours.  An equality movement arose, it succeeded, and within a matter of years the land dissolved into a bloodbath of violence that took the life of nearly every man, woman, and child their, save a few scattered refugees.  It was all we could do, it took the desperate combined efforts of all the clans, to hold the border against the rampaging gangs until they had all slaughtered each other.  Is that not powerful evidence for your point of view?

Why do I not feel that you are persuaded, cousin? says one of the older men drily.

The count smiles.  Ask yourselves, how did the equality movement succeed?  The movement itself, the ideological fervor and commitment, is able to hold the commoners with woo in check as long as it is succeeding.  It was only after they won that everything fell apart.  And while the movement lasts, it creates an enormous amount of power.  Even counting those of us at the margins who have the barest fringe of power, we of the woo blood are perhaps some 10% of the population.  A  movement that is willing to give woo to all willy nilly can create legions to overwhelm us.  We know that the power so created is ultimately a false power, it cannot last, it will turn on itself and destroy itself.  But in the meantime the power is real and overwhelming.  It can reach a point where we cannot hope to prevail.

And as for educating the commoners and relying on their common sense.  Well.  It would work, if people were better than they were.  If you could rely on everyone to be so farsighted and reasonable and self-sacrificing, the plan would work.  But if everyone were that way, there would be no need for the plan, because giving woo to all would not be dangerous.  No, cousins, I am afraid your picture of human nature as prone to delusion and shortsightedness and greed is correct, which means your plan is wrong.  You cannot expect the commoners in society to all be aristocrats of the soul.

No, says the count, we must grasp the nettle.  The only solution is to find a way to make it work for the vast majority to have woo.  The equality people cannot.  They are deluded.  But it has to be done and it must be us that does it.  We must find a way that works, and way to transfer that is not disgusting, a way for everyone to live in beauty as aristocrats and men of the blood.

There is shock.

It is the only way, he says.  Yes, lets try and suppress the movement now.  Yes, lets see if propaganda and education can give us a bit more time.  But what we should really be discussing is if some of us should flee far far out of our ken as a failsafe against our possible failure here, while we here desperately try to square the circle, or if all of us should.