“I want to believe that.”
“I didn’t ask you what you wanted,” the old man said, his words carrying a sharp enunciation that made it clear he would accept no such avoidance. “I asked what you believe.”
“Then yes. I do believe that people are basically good.”
“Easy enough to say, though history sadly proves otherwise. In the face of the worldwide collapse that’s soon to be upon us, we’ll be lost if we place our faith in wishes and hopes for the best.” He picked up a folded newspaper near his hand and passed it across the desk. “This is the essence of human nature, left to its own devices.”
Noah took the newspaper, expecting to see a run-of-the-mill story of a faraway genocide or massacre, widespread child abuse by some august religious institution, or maybe a retrospective of Nazi atrocities or the horrors of the killing fields. But it’s too easy to indict a powerful regime and its leaders while giving a pass to the followers themselves-they, the people who took the orders without question or stood by, silent, and watched the nightmare come to pass. The example his father had chosen was smaller, and cut deeper, and was a much harder thing to simply chalk up to some vague blanket notion of man’s inhumanity to man.
The headline of the story was TURKISH GIRL, 16, BURIED ALIVE FOR TALKING TO BOYS.
The text below went on to explain that a young girl had been the victim of an honor killing, not an uncommon thing in many cultures, allegedly at the hands of her own father and grandfather. They’d buried her alive under a chicken pen in the backyard behind the house. And this was no crime of passion; it takes a long, thoughtful time to do such a thing. In fact, a family council meeting had determined what her punishment should be for the crime of hanging out with her friends.
Noah put the paper down. “This doesn’t mean that all of humanity is evil,” he said. “There are always extremists.”
“I was a social anthropologist, you’ll recall, before I became a pitchman, so with all due respect let me assure you that it’s much closer to everyone than you might be willing to believe. People are made of the same stuff around the world. If that girl had been born in South Africa she’d have been as likely to be raped by the time she was sixteen as to learn how to read. Slavery in one form or another is more widespread today than ever before in history. The fact that one in a million of us may have evolved beyond those lower instincts is of no great comfort to me.
“It’s getting worse, Noah, not better. There have always been only four kinds of people in the world: the visionaries who choose the course, and we are the fewest; the greedy and corruptible-they’re useful, because they’ll do anything for a short-term gain; the revolutionaries, a handful of violent, backward thinkers whose only mission is to stand in the way of progress-we’ll deal with them in short order; and then there are the masses, the lemmings who can scarcely muster the intelligence to blindly follow along.
“There are far more of them than there are of us, and more are coming every day. When I was born there were two billion people in the world; now that number has more than tripled, all in a single lifetime. And it isn’t the Mozarts, or the Einsteins, or the Pascals, or Salks, or Shakespeares, or the George Washingtons who are swelling the population beyond the breaking point. It’s the useless eaters on the savage side of the bell curve who are outbreeding the planet’s ability to support them.
“A billion people around the world are slowly starving to death right now. Twenty thousand children will die of hunger today. That’s the decaying state of the human condition. And when the real hard times come-and they’re coming soon-you can multiply all the horrors by a thousand. In the vacuum created by fear and ignorance and hunger and want, it’s evil, not good, that rushes in to fill the void.”
It sounded like there was no answer, but he knew his father too well for that to be the case. You didn’t have to like it, but the old man always had a solution.
“What we’ve finally come to understand, Noah, is that the people can’t be trusted to control themselves. Even the brightest of them are still barbarians at heart. We’ve only just bailed out my friends on Wall Street from under the devastation of the last financial bubble they created, and I guarantee they’re already hard at work pumping up the next one, even as they know full well that it will be fatal. It’s like a death wish of the species: it’s in our genes, this appetite for destruction. And if we’re to survive, those urges must be brought under control.
“The riddle today is the same one faced by the Founding Fathers when they began their experiment. Societies need government. Governments elevate men into power, and men who seek power are prone to corruption. It spreads like a disease, then, corruption on corruption, and sooner or later the end result is always a slide into tyranny. That’s the way it’s always been. And so this government of the United States was brilliantly designed to keep that weakness of human nature in check, but it required the people to participate daily, to be vigilant, and they have not. It demanded that they behave as though their government was their servant, but they have not. In their silence the people of the United States have spoken. While they slept the servant has become their master.
“The American experiment has failed, and now it’s time for the next one to begin. One world, one government-not of the people this time, but of the right people: the competent, the wise, and the strong.”
The dope-induced haze was still hanging there before Noah’s eyes, and his stomach had begun to churn. Between the remains of the opiates swirling through his brain and the drugs he’d been given to counter those effects, he could feel himself starting to lose the metabolic tug-of-war. All these words his father was saying, all the things he’d seen in that presentation, what he’d learned from Molly in the hours they were together, and what he’d learned of her since-something was trying to come together in his mind but he wasn’t fit to think it all the way through.
“You’re saying there’s no hope for this country,” Noah said.
“I’m saying, Noah, that my clients came to me with a problem,” the old man said, “and I gave them a solution. We start tomorrow morning. I’ve stood by and watched the glacial pace of this decline for too many years. Now the remnants of the past will be swept away in a single stroke, and I’ll see my vision realized before I die. Order from chaos, control, and pacification of the flawed human spirit. Call that hope if you like, but it’s coming regardless. The experiment that begins tomorrow will not fail.”
PART THREE
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
– EDWARD BERNAYS, AUTHOR OF Propaganda
CHAPTER 32
Noah had excused himself suddenly and then stumbled his way into the elegant stall in the corner of his father’s private restroom. You know you’re sick when you’re still vomiting ten minutes after the last thing was expelled from your stomach. He was still hugging the porcelain bowl, drained and wretched, feeling like he’d just capped off a marathon with four hundred sit-ups.
Once he was fairly sure the nausea had passed, he pushed himself to his feet, walked to the sink, and turned on the water as hot as he could stand. He let the basin fill and then bent and washed his face, let the heat try to revive him until he felt whatever flicker of energy he still possessed begin to gather. He stood then, dried himself with a hanging towel, re-buttoned and tucked in his shirt, and then used his sleeve to clear the steam from the ornate mirror over the lavatory.
His skin was as pale as a Newark Bay oyster, but while he was certainly beat he wasn’t quite out of commission yet.
