Chapter 125. Preparations to Destroy a Scumbag’s Life. (6/8)

Were you always such a busybody, Yuna? Stop giving her so much help. Let her stumble her way along and figure things out herself. No, actually, she was probably incentivized by the referral bonus. I didn’t have such a benefit with how I wasn’t officially employed and on the books. Records had to be kept in such cases when giving out referral bonuses. Rosa and I couldn’t benefit from it. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Yuna was Rosa’s referrer rather than me.

But for Rosa, that sort of bonus wasn’t a big deal when Ione considered the amount she’d save every month thanks to her parents and work if she got hired. That five hundred dollars bonus would amount to some small change in her eyes.

To Alicia though, that was a sizable sum that made a difference. She’d also get twenty-five percent off from the employee discount when making purchases here. To receive the bonus, the new employee had to work for three months. It wasn’t something she would receive immediately, but it would be a nice something extra to look forward to and incentivize people to not quit right after being trained. It costs money, time, and resources to hire and train new employees. A company would lose more money in three months if they had people constantly quitting than if they just gave out that referral bonus and kept even just one more employee.

It was a system put in place after seriously weighing the benefits to the costs. A carrot on a stick; that was the best analogy for it.

With Yuna’s strong support of Alicia, I didn’t butt in. Alicia and Yuna exchanged contact information and Yuna provided her with the application form. She even explained the sort of traits and keywords to include in her cover letter and resume. She even explained how she could exaggerate some details to stand out.

It must be nice being a pretty girl, everyone’s willing to blab about these sorts of things to them. I’m not jealous or anything. I had to figure everything out from scratch on my own without anyone explaining these things to me.

When Alicia left the store with her application in hand, she appeared abnormally confident. The exact opposite of the way she acted when she first entered with her lost puppy dog eyes.

With Alicia gone, I returned to number crunching on the spreadsheet on my phone. By the time I finished my estimates, I was wide-eyed and shocked. Everyone’s potential savings with an arrangement like this was shocking.

I gulped nervously and resolved myself. I would convince Irene no matter what. What she was doing right now was foolish. Utter foolishness. She was too overly caught up in the idea of her daughter and university that she hadn’t taken a look at the bigger picture in regards to the special situation we found ourselves in.

Scary. Polygamy was scary. What a terrifying thing. No wonder it was forbidden. If it was allowed, the rich would band together and completely destroy the poor. Those who couldn’t fit into a group or were unattractive wouldn’t stand a chance. It would create a disparity even greater than now.

So it hasn’t been banned for something like love, but because of this. In a way, it was in consideration of the weakest members of society. If strong individuals all banded together with each other, the entire financial system could very well collapse in a well-developed country rich in resources. In a country that wasn’t so well developed and not rich in resources it wouldn’t be a big deal, but here, it truly was.

The rich only get richer, a statement already true in this current era, would only be exacerbated if polygamy were truly allowed. A well-disciplined large family would be like a giant machine, a business of its own. The government wouldn’t even be able to do anything about it either.

Thus, limiting how many legal spouses they would recognize, was a means to maintain the stability of the country.

In nature though, it’s survival of the fittest. Nature doesn’t care about your feelings. What it cares about is producing the strongest, most resilient organisms possible. Polygamy is the perfect representation of strength in numbers.

Somehow, this little number crunching session made me acknowledge how terrifying polygamy truly was. It was an eye-opener. If one wanted to screw the government out of money and make them bleed, polygamy was no doubt the answer with the sort of system currently in place.

Their attempt to give benefits to only monogamous relationships was a cheap effort to deter polyamorous ones. To keep the economy healthy, they needed wealth segregated and not pooled into one specific group. It was something that affected the financial stability and balance of power within the country, their decision made perfect sense. They wanted to protect their own interests in the long run as well.

I let out a long sigh. I’d been blind to it all my life. People often read stories with polygamy in it, many disdained it and heralded monogamy as the only truly good stories with romance, but they never truly thought about anything deeper than that. Romance, it was nothing more than the surface-level rubbish those at the top wanted to focus your attention on. They wanted you to latch onto that idealistic nonsense, a single partner, intertwined together with you till death do you part. Your fated, destined person.

It amounted to nothing. They were all cheap lies fed to us so we would avert our eyes from the cruel reality hidden beneath the surface. It was a beautiful dream presented to us on a silver platter. Sadly, reality still remained.

Polygamy was truly a very deep topic. Much deeper than the average person ever imagined. I suddenly felt like I was in too deep down the rabbit hole known as polygamy. Now that I found myself in this exact situation, I could see it all for what it really was. If you never went looking, you’d never find the truth.

Perhaps it was better to remain ignorant to that truth. To simply accept the lies and turn one's eyes away from the facts.

The reason polygamy was frowned upon, we’d all been deceived.

I started searching online and reading answers. Slowly but surely, the words in answers given in various examples reaffirmed my theory. Nobody gave an explanation like mine, but it was true that extraordinarily heavy penalties were imposed upon such relationships. Arresting the husband, confiscating assets, and leaving the wives and children with no ways to support themselves. Those were some of the words used.

When I thought about it, wasn’t it precisely polygamy that gave birth to kings and queens, aristocracy? Is that now how such a system rose to power? If a man had two hundred wives, let’s say half worked and half reared and raised children. You could raise an army of loyal children to wage a war who would all fight for you in a short period of time.

A chill ran down my back and I instinctively gulped. This wasn’t a joke. This was just how serious the government took this topic. It was all about money, power, and control. They would use such cases as I described to set extreme examples to act as an even greater deterrent to others.

Don’t become like them.

Scary.

That was the first word I thought when that idea came to mind.

I was so terrified I immediately stopped reading any further into it. I decided to search for a web novel to read for the remainder of my shift to get my mind off of it.

Never underestimate the horror of polygamy. It wasn’t banned without reason. It wasn’t simply petty squabbles over inheritance or parental responsibility, nor was it because it was immoral or because of men abusing and taking advantage of young vulnerable women. Those were all reasons of convenience used as a cover. The true answer laid elsewhere.

If a woman dated multiple men it would be seen as much less of a problem. Though she would be called a slut or whore, that was about it. But when a man dated multiple women, it was no wonder the stigma was so horrifyingly negative toward it. Other guys close to them might give them a pat on the back and joke about them being a player, but society overall would scorn them and not tolerate it. In part, it would be out of jealousy, but on a subconscious level, it might be the result of unconscious fear.

Sure, a woman could one by one gather many men, but she herself could only rear one child. Those men would age and become useless. Though she could have those men proliferate with other women, those women wouldn’t be loyal to her and may not even obey. The child’s loyalty would be questionable as well.

If a man married multiple women though, the situation was the exact opposite. The power they could amass in a short period of time was an exponential curve. The woman’s journey to power was a linear one at best.

Enough! Enough already!

Stop digging deeper to the source, the root of everything. Just focus on reading the web novel the site selected for me at random.

Let’s see here, what was the title again?

I raised an eyebrow when I read the title, ‘Co-worker Observation Diary.’