Fidel - Prologue. Author's Note

My stories are prompted by ideas that rattle around in my head demanding escape. Fidel is the result of wondering what life will be like in another few decades when the planet’s population has doubled to fifteen billion, food and water are running out, infrastructure is decaying, and the climate has become ever more dangerously unstable.

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, commenting on social order in 1849 wrote; “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”. A proposition I choose to interpret as meaning: Circumstances may change, but how we govern ourselves doesn't.

Why is it that most humans always end up being exploited? In my opinion it’s because for the first three hundred thousand years of our existence, humans survived by being strongly individualistic, and ten thousand years of living in permanent social groups [civilization] hasn’t been long enough to quell this individualistic urge.

The result being that would-be Chiefs, Kings, Presidents and others who want to rule us, are forced to control the revolting individualists by giving them ‘bread and circuses’, and if that doesn’t work, by using their well armed police enforcers who are ever ready to kill, hurt and imprison all who step out of line.

Their allies in this subjugation of the masses are organised religions that augment the physical threats in this life, with the prospect of eternal fire, torture and damnation after death, to all who refuse to obey the priests. This vile concept was invented by power-hungry witchdoctors who cleverly replaced the multitude of personalised, relatively benign, natural gods of forest, river, air and sea, with a single, omnipotent angry, vengeful supernatural deity.

Powerful men and women are almost always bad. Corrupted by wealth and power, they see the state and its citizens as the means to garner ever more power and wealth to themselves. This is done by enslaving most of them, and waging wars against all obstacles to their desires.

No nation state has ever gone to war for the good of its citizens. The sole purpose of war is, and always has been, to make powerful and wealthy men richer and more powerful.

The unsurprising result of centuries of repression of individuals and constant war has been to maintain the same division of wealth as has been the case in all societies since humans first huddled in permanent settlements – the ruling 1% owning 99% of the wealth. The sole change to the equation today, is that ubiquitous and total surveillance of every individual, combined with ever more lethally armed police, has made revolution impossible.

Please don’t let the future depicted in Fidel depress you unduly – I could be wrong.