[This post was originally presented to a smaller audience on September 23rd, 2016. A few days later squirrels hacked my blog and posted it to a wider audience. Squirrels understand that information, like bullshit, wants to be free.]
The analyst was terrified. This wasn’t going well.
He was addressing a hastily assembled audience of Government heavyweights and Military brass; generals, vaguely defined security officers, government operatives, and of course, a representative of Walmart’s Extreme Greeter Department. These were precisely who you called when the world was in danger but they were doing nothing!
He’d spent all morning with slides and handouts; explaining the situation. He’d included evidence to support his findings. There was no flaw in his logic. This thing was dangerous and it would get out of control. Immediate action was imperative!
The threat hadn’t so much tapped into a new technology as hack into an existing flaw in modern society. One that had been placed there, on purpose, long ago by people who should have known better.
During the post war era, the Government had a lot of clandestine scientists left over from the Manhattan Project. Since the research infrastructure was there, Truman left the eggheads to their own devices hoping they’d cure cancer or something. Instead they mastered knowledge that made theoretical physics seem harmless. They created and unleashed a self-replicating mental flaw that was nearly undetectable and infinitely adaptive. Never leave extremely smart people unsupervised!
How they performed this deed was classified. (These secrets were created during a time when the word “classified” was respected. As such they were not pasted on some fool’s private server in a shitter in Colorado. For that the analyst was thankful. He didn’t know how it was done and had no desire to know. He barely slept at night as it was.)
That first round of mad scientists had created the psychic fuse, the self-replicating ability to plant utter bullshit in the human mind. Once there it took root so deeply the subject couldn’t see their own irrationality. In this they were wildly successful. So much so that it was now endemic in the public. (There was an economy of bullshit producers working to fill opportunities created by this self-replicating flaw. They were called “marketers”.)
Fortunately, subsequent attempts to “light the fuse” failed. Getting a person to think bullshit was easy; getting them to act was hard. Mostly the bullshit corroded the subject’s mental circuits and caused them to sit on the couch watching “Ow My Balls”. Attempts to activate the flaw included the project MKUltra and strange manipulations of public schools. The former led to Timothy Leary and bad poetry. The latter led to an 18 trillion dollar deficit.
Unfortunately, in 1972, an obscure quartet from Sweden hit upon the secret. Abba realized that particular combinations of rhythm, meter, and “hook” could draw on that pre-installed infrastructure and break the strongest mind. The CIA was frightened by the massive amounts of bullshit generated and in 1973 officially halted all MKUltra research. The CIA felt it was safer to focus on less dangerous activities like overthrowing banana republics. Meanwhile, Abba continued to unleash the bullshit within and created a monster. The form of their destroyer was a series of chart topping hits from 1974 through 1982. Eventually an MI6 agent, pining for better music, went rogue and forced them to stop. What that brave man did to accomplish this feat is unknown to history, but he (if it was a he) saved the world from a horrific oppressive disco-ocracy that might have lasted for generations and certainly was ruining culture.
Now, decades later, the squirrels had figured it out. The furry little pissants were sitting in an oak tree with Wi-Fi fine tuning the craft of destroying self-control. Far more frighteningly they were disseminating their techniques. Their Facebook page “Mary And Terry Hate Men” was generating thousands of hits an hour and their fanbase was expanding geometrically.
On Facebook, nobody knows you’re evil, or a squirrel. This was how Armageddon begins!
At this stage it all could be stopped. One sniper taking out two squirrels would do it. The NSA (which created, owns, and operates Facebook) could drop the site down the memory hole and hunt down most electronic traces. All that would remain would be a few disappointed fans sitting around sipping tea, bitching about men, and listening to Abba. Society could withstand a certain level of mayhem.
The problem was, nobody wanted to stop it because nobody wanted to believe they were already full of shit. The mind rejects such a notion. Thus he couldn’t convince anyone to take action!
One of the Extreme Greeters spoke up. “So you’re saying I’m already half brainwashed, and all it takes is Swedish disco to lock it in and give my mind’s control to an external actor?” He had a mocking lilt to his voice.
“Yes, and I can prove it. I’ll ask you a few very simple questions. You answer with the first thing that pops into your head. Since I know the right questions I’ll trigger the already pre-planted bullshit.”
“OK, shoot.”
“If Bob has two apples and Ralph has five apples; Ralph is what?”
“Racist!”
The analyst smiled, he’d proven his point. Yet the Greeter didn’t see it, nor did the audience.
“You don’t think it’s weird that you think Ralph is racist when I didn’t tell you anything about Bob and Ralph?” He prompted.
The Greeter had an angry grimace…. Cognitive dissonance was an unpleasant feeling. “Fuck you!” He shouted.
“So, you know nothing about Ralph’s thinking but you know he was a racist; and when I ask you for details you shout an obscenity? Doesn’t that seem odd?” The analyst coaxed.
“Let me try! I love games.” It was the head of the Department of Education, how she got in this room was beyond the analyst’s understanding but perhaps she was willing to see…
“OK, you have 32 students in a classroom, how do you determine which one is the smartest?”
“I don’t understand your question; all students are equal.” She wrinkled her nose.
“Here’s the second part of the question, there are 32 NFL football teams, which one was the best last season?”
She giggled, “You don’t think I know because I’m a woman but I do. The Denver Broncos won the Superbowl.”
“So you cannot differentiate between students in a classroom but you can for football teams?”
“You’re an asshole!” She grumbled.
He looked from the Greeter to the Department of Education bureaucrat. Neither one saw a flaw in their logic. Yet both agreed that the analyst was deplorable.
He gave it one more try. He pointed to a random man in the audience, a military fellow sporting an impressive array of awards and insignia.
“You sir, what do you do?”
“US Navy.” He responded proudly. “My actual rank and job duties are um… classified.”
“That’s fine, have you ever been on a boat?”
“The word you’re looking for is ‘ship’ and yes I was stationed on the USS Carl Vinson; an aircraft carrier. We were in the Adriatic Sea during the Bosnian war from ’92-’95.” He said this as if to imply he’d ‘seen things’ and this ‘wasn’t his first rodeo’.
This was just what the analyst was hoping for.
“So tell me, what was the greatest risk you faced during that tour of duty?”
“Global warming!”
“You were on a military craft, during war, and you think climate was your most immediate personal threat? I mean sure there’s long term issues but on any given Tuesday… while in a theater of war you were most at risk of…”
“Reduced polar bear populations.”
“Not the fact that you were on a floating nuclear reactor? Not the risk of rocket attack?”
“Certainly not. You’re wasting our time here!”
Exhausted, the analyst shuffled to a chair and sat down. The crowd began to murmur; the collective agreement was that they’d been brought here under false pretenses. That there was supposedly some sort of danger and this was just a fool wasting their time with PowerPoint slides. They were busy people after all.
The analyst began to weep. They were all going to die.