He paused here and stared out over the water, brooding in silence and turning his face away from Margaret. When he faced her again, however, she saw that some of the darkness had subsided from his eyes. He released a protracted sigh, and then continued.
‘Do not think though, with everything that I am telling you, that I see only the darkness of humankind. There is good, there is empathy, there is compassion in humanity, yes. I will admit that freely enough. But, on the other end of the scale there is a greed that is boundless, utterly boundless in its capacity, a dark greed that enables the worst and most unimaginable of evils to be perpetrated. And on this continuum, this line that stretches from the shining light on one end of the spectrum to the crushing darkness of the deepest shadows on the other, lies the great mass of “normal people”. Normal people, Dr Green, who believe themselves to be good, decent beings. And to be sure, they do not generally possess in them an active malice. No, they are not evil, not actively … but they are something far worse, in the greater scheme of things: they are indifferent. They are apathetic. They are, without a doubt, callous and self-serving. While most will balk at this suggestion, it does not take much beyond the most cursory of examinations to see that this is true. They live to consume, and only to consume. Restraint, critical thought, self-examination, reflection, inconveniencing oneself to help others, sacrifice for the greater good … these concepts are not simply unknown to them, no. On a deep, secret level that they do not like to acknowledge or even think about, these concepts actively disgust them.
You have surely seen cartoons in which someone asks the question, “who wants to change the world?”, which is met with a sea of enthusiastically raised hands. The next panel usually asks the question, “good, so who wants to change themselves?”, and this question is met with a mass answer of deafening silence. It is a simplistic representation, but it is the core of the problem. Indifference acts as a brake, as an insurmountable obstacle in the path towards true self-reflection, compassion and empathy. It is far easier to swallow a bunch of new-age nonsense about hugging people and smiling at strangers and holding hands and working on your own “unique journey” and “self-love” than it is to actually critically examine one’s own habits and addictions, and how immensely destructive to the rest of the living world they are. This is because you can spread inane messages of vague inspiration and fluffy happiness – or spew righteous indignation about a group to which you do not belong, but which, for this reason or that, you can gleefully vilify – without having to actually sacrifice any of your addictions, without having to hold yourself, naked and exposed, up to the glaring and unflattering mirror of self-examination, and thereby admit that you too are complicit in all sorts of evils that exist and fester the world over behind closed doors. Behind high fences, behind barbed wire, inside filthy sheds, factory farms, slaughterhouses, cosmetics laboratories, brick factories, textile warehouses, electronic equipment dumps, landfills, trawler ships, in brothels, in deep quarries and mines, in holes torn in the skin of the Earth Mother to rip out her treasures: in these hellish places lies the silent guilt and damning complicity of the human race. There is a complete unwillingness on the part of most human beings to acknowledge the plight of billions upon billions of enslaved beings – human and nonhuman – upon whose immense and indescribable suffering vast swathes of humanity live lives of hollow comfort and empty luxury, and dance in swirling waltzes of addiction and consumption. And it is through this mass of indifference, this apathetic yet iron-armoured indifference, that true evil prospers, swells and thrives.
And it is against this evil that I have fought for centuries, and against it I will always fight. It is against these evils – and the cruel apathy of the vast majority of humanity – that my troops and I rail.’
Margaret could think of nothing to say in response to this; all she could do was to stare, somewhat guiltily, at the pacifically rippling surface of the river. How could one respond at all to something like this? It was all too much to even begin to contemplate.
The boat soon pulled into a small harbour area, built into the river with huge round rocks of stone. In the water, near a wall of rock, floated dozens of large plastic barrels.
‘What are those?’ Margaret asked, thankful for an opportunity to change the topic.
‘Those are used for a multitude of purposes,’ the General, who seemed to have become calmer, answered. ‘Each of those barrels is insulated and waterproof, and very buoyant. They can be filled with up to five hundred kilograms of liquid or solid materials, and still float upright, in fact. They are also built to withstand shock and impact. So, for the few substances we require that we cannot manufacture ourselves, we have them airdropped in using these barrels. The drops happen, of course, very far away from this city and my other bases in this area, and the barrels are then brought through the jungle by my, how shall we say, heftier troops – the ones who can transform into animals such as rhinoceroses, buffaloes, hippopotamuses and other such creatures, who are able to carry great weight.’
‘That makes sense. But how come they’re in the river here?’
‘For two reasons. The first is that these containers are very expensive, and it would be wasteful to purchase new ones every time we need supplies. They are extremely durable, so it makes sense to keep reusing them. Secondly, we actually do produce a great surplus in many of the crops we raise, more than we can consume before they rot. So instead of
