The Curious Tale Turns 21
The Curious Tale is 21 years old today-old enough to drink! For years leading up to that day, a story had been building up in me, the great Joshalonian declaration: I would fix all that was wrong with the world! Most teenagers are eager to make their mark on the world at that age (I was 16, a couple weeks from turning 17), giving them a certain headstrong ambition, but you have to admit that mine was uncommonly grand in scope and humanistic in tone! So, as it always was with me, my coalescing ideas and growing aspirations erupted in a single burst of creative productivity. I toiled all night writing the Prelude, posting it on a roleplaying forum around six o'clock in the morning on July 12, 1999. Others joined in, and the rest is history.
This week, I've been thinking about how adamant I used to be in those days that, contrary to popular opinion, our world will actually be a better place in 100 years. People were too cynical, I held, too small-minded, too weak and little to see past their own pitiful perspective and envision the bigger picture. What mooks! However, this confidence of mine would not go on to be supported by experience in the years that followed. Expansions in rights and recognition for persecuted minorities in our own country have made history, and brought human rights to a new high water mark, but the backlash has been widespread and terrible. Meanwhile, the nation itself is decaying so fast you can see it with the naked eye, and the liberal order of the world seems like it's imploding. And that's to say nothing of the environmental and industrial hardships ahead of us. Today I think it's very hard to tell if we are on track to be better or worse off in the year 2100.
I've been thinking about how disillusioned I am in most of our norms and customs--not the grandeur of our designs, which are not lacking, but the smallness of the people who make them so, and the uncommonness of good folk. The medical profession...brilliant in principle but totally useless to those who need it the most. Anti-fat bigotry, everywhere, with mindless obsessions toward futile dieting and moral panics about an "obesity epidemic," rather than the wise and unbelievably simple acceptance of this reality in our nature. The rich and the corrupt...they always get away with bilking the working class. Always, always, always. What it all comes down to is just what failures so many people are at participating in, you know, civilization. I have thought that humanity is mostly dead weight, but I used to think that this dead weight wouldn't hold us back, and now I don't know anymore. It seems that social prosperity and peace are tonics for corruption and degeneracy. It seems that freedom from exploitation and abuse instills entitlement and arrogance and thanklessness. It seems that, when most humans are comfortable, they become terrible creatures. And the institutions people populate, from medicine to academia to art and all the rest of it, I don't know that I would agree, anymore, with my old view that these institutions develop their own momentum and pull the dregs of humanity forward. Perhaps they have no momentum of their own. Perhaps every generation's fate is sealed by the state of the world it is born into. Perhaps superlative cultures and failed cultures alike are a product of circumstance alone. I no longer expect my nation to serve me, or others in need, except perhaps occasionally, and my desire to serve my nation has reciprocated, gradually but unmistakably.
As I have been thinking about these things, it hasn't been lost on me that, yes, I overreacted when I was young; I was too positive; but that I should also take care not to overreact in the other direction now that I'm disillusioned and old: There are, after all, still good people out there. Not everyone is a mook. That's how it has always been. My personal disillusionment doesn't touch the world any more than my optimism did. And, objectively, humanity has done okay so far, and is doing okay right now. So I have had to remind myself that the indignity of coming to realize that I am not going to outlive human idiocy and ignorance doesn't mean that there aren't good doctors or worthy rich people or people who merrily accept the existence of fat folk. And after thinking on it, I was reaffirmed in the wisdom of a policy of mine that has been building for the past several years: that my time to speak on worldly matters is coming to an end, for I am old and bitter, and it is best I cede the stage to others, who are young and supple and hopeful and have a mark yet to make on the world.
I have been thinking for some time now about retiring from real-world politics, and I've told myself that that's a total joke--that I am way too political to ever "retire" from it--and that if I wanted to put my money where my mouth is I should retire before the election in November, because I know there's no way I'd be able to actually do that and stick to it. Still, the arrows do point in that direction. I have become less politically active than I used to be. I have become far more willing to hold my peace and not engage in political discussions and arguments in the first place. As many of my age peers who once looked down on politics are finally, only now (!), realizing that politics is important and daring to take a stand, I see my own tour of service for king and country nearing its completion. And I have gained perspective, and come to comprehend, that my personal insertion into politics is, visions of grandeur notwithstanding, not actually vital, and certainly not "indispensable"--that politics doesn't need me. So if I live long enough, there may yet come a day when I finally become humble enough, or weary enough, to leave real-world politics behind for good.
But holding my peace doesn't mean I don't still have convictions, principles, and opinions. Indeed, as time goes on these come into continually sharper focus, both in my own mind and in my fiction. And in fact, as a creature unmoored to the strictures of convention and popularity, many of my views are quite extreme, in the sense of being unconcerned with being inherently similar to views that are popular and accepted.
Indeed, it is refreshing just how little my principles have changed as a result of my long ordeal. I am no longer confident in humanity's triumph into that Star Trekkian utopia of enlightened enrichment, but I'm still a humanist. In spite of everything, I still think that anyone who deserves to live deserves basic dignity and a basic material quality of life. I'm still against torture and exploitation and all those other things most "decent" folk are actually in favor of when you ask the question just right. I'm still a sexual egalitarian even though both sexes seem to be going out of their way to make me hate them. And, amazingly, I am still bullish on the idea of humanity. Most of my ideas are extreme only because the existing norms are so blatantly unacceptable. Like the idea that an investor's income from rent money on a residential unit they own is less important than that renter's human right to shelter. Most people don't see it that way. Most people sympathize with the landlord, even if they think they don't. And while some of my views are extreme in the more traditional sense of being "radical" (which, in this context, we might define as being far outside the human intuitive norm), radical ideas aren't inherently invalid or even unsavory. They're just different, and in my opinion frankly humanity should go outside of its intuitive norms more often and more vigorously. As much as I love the notion of humanity as a whole, there's a lot of specific detail about the human condition that I despise.
Our world needs Galavar and the Galance Ideal as much as ever. So today, at 21, I lift up my glass to Galavar and Meretange Gala. We should all be so fortunate to encounter his like soon.
And as for me...here's a birthday song from Galaxy Federal.