The chapter previous was written some months or years ago, by an author who has since lost sight of the original artistic vision for the themes. The joke that that story was based upon cannot be recalled, beyond it broadly being something about the cult of reason and the replacement of the gods. The story itself is a completed work. In light of this, consider three following cases:
Arsenic demands little more than complete submission to its will, but it is not a swift adversary. From exposure, its victim still has a number of hours, upwards of ten, in which they retain their lives. It is also readily absorbed from soil deposits by rice, necessitating various regulatory bodies to oversee rice production to ensure that the arsenic levels are safe.
Following a 1960s attempt by the Soviet Union to expand cotton production in central Asia by way of constructing a number of irrigation canals, the Aral sea began to drain. This process, while not wholly irreversible, has yet to be reversed. This has damaged fishing prospects for the locals, and lead to a number of dust storms as the winds kick up sediments from the former sea floor. If there was ever a case to be made against the Soviets, there’s a good chance this is it.
The process production and purification of insulin has, in many ways, gained a somewhat maligned association since its invention, due to price-gouging and patent-related trickery by pharmaceutical companies forcing diabetics to have to dangerously ration their medication. This is especially frustrating considering the intent of its original creators was for it to be available cheaply or freely to those who needed it. It is still vitally important to note that, regardless of price-gouging, trickery, or the subversion of the creators’ wishes, the net impact of insulin has of course been positive. An illness that used to be a death sentence is now relatively simple to treat.
The original thesis of the story was some ham-fisted religious joke, if memory serves, but upon reflection, the motif of the revolutionary struggle against the divinity nature is the more salient one, at least in the mind of the author. It is certainly the more well-remembered motif, and one with a number of historical corollaries, as displayed above. These three cases display the same revolutionary impulse as a person driving a knife in between the second and third ribs of God.
I get the sense the version of me who wrote the story would find this analysis superficial and my insistence upon its merit grating. She has more or less the same analysis, certainly, and she used the same example of the Aral sea when describing what she was trying to say to her friend, shortly after writing the first chapter. Regardless, I think she might take umbrage to my framing the destruction of the Aral sea as fundamentally the same as the creation of Insulin. She isn’t here, however.
A revolution must not stop at the borders of what is natural or sacred. If the cult of reason could try to cast down Catholicism from its pedestal in France, a modern revolution must similarly try to cast down nature from its pedestal over the earth. What replaces it need not serve us, but it must obey us.
Finally, to the people who commented on the original chapter presenting a belief that I had written some grand critique of democracy or revolutions. That was not my intent. I am alive, and I say your interpretation was bad.
