The year is 4050 AD, 1043 years after the Cosmic Bang to be precise. Jack looked out the window of the neutrino driven space-cab that ran on the energy of black holes. It was remarkable how scientists had discovered that all the waste and dead bodies of the world could be dumped into the trash can that was the black hole and it would provide cosmic energy for years to come through a parallel universe. Legend had it that ancient American civilization had predicted this around the year 1905, but not until over a thousand years later did the tall man with a handlebar moustache and no hair sitting in a lab on the magnetic South Pole create the cosmic bang that was the one stop solution to depleting so-called renewable sources of energy.
I was walking along the soils of Scotland, feeling the pain in my knees that my overweight tummy was exerting on my knobbly knees, worsened only by the gravel on the ground creating an uneven surface. Stirling castle lay ahead, with a sign imploring me to understand that archaeological works were going on to determine the exact nature of the death of King Henry VIII in1594, over four hundred years ago. His step mom had married his dad because he had been sexy, while James the Vth, his father, didn't exactly believe in the equality of men and women. While his 3 year long kitchen imprisonment of the wife ended in her execution, the son was no holy saint either. He killed his father, took the throne for himself and spent the rest of his days in the Great Hall his father had commissioned.
As Jack dragged his Widget for In-situ Foetus Enhancement, the W.I.F.E. behind him, he entered a few complaints on the Telepath, the inter-planetary network of thoughts that streamed thoughts from around the world to respective administrators. The W.I.F.E. was not being a sufficient source of adoration, ego-boost and biological enhancement. Little did it have to do with the fact that AI forces that handled 99% of the world's administration since the Cosmic Bang had since reconfigured the human being to maximize probability of harmony and reproduction. It had resulted in the W.I.F.E. being encapsulated in an air bubble created especially to protect the owner, or caretaker as he was called from any outbursts. Jack's attention was drawn back to the humanoid droning away in front of him. Apparently the land he had flown his W.I.F.E. to, was an ancient civilization, that thrived on a system where the inhabitants took their own decisions. It was called a democracy, the guide explained. It sounded totally unbelievable to Jack.
Actually his great grandfather had commissioned it, and his grandfather who was the monarch after him was responsible for decommissioning it. Then his dad had come along and restarted the project and blown up the winnings of a war at least 10000 people had lost their lives in. How naive and inhuman, I thought. Confining women to four walls of a kitchen! And these are the guys who teach us etiquette, with all their bloody history? For a moment, I was grateful for having been born in an age where people's rights were respected, and those who respected people's rights were considered people to learn from. It meant that I could sit in college and do what I wanted with my breadboard and wires. It meant that I could be an active part of the system, make myself heard and be part of a vibrant system our textbooks called democracy. No wonder these ages were called the dark ages until they stumbled upon democracy. What took them so long?
It sounded lke a W.I.F.E.-foetus problem to Jack - did the system work for the people or the people work for the system? The guide explained that while imperfections of the system often resulted in physical damage to the exoskeleton of the inhabitants of the country, it generally ensured that most issues of the nation were discussed at length in the public. On asking, Jack was told that a particularly flat sandstone, was erstwhile called a television and was attached to the walls of most houses. It was akin to the projection that the telepath made between the brain and the inside of the forehead, something scientists call the mind's eye. Jack found it hard to even imagine. He closed his eyes and thought about "television", resulting in a video demo of the television on the inside of his forehead. Fascinating, he thought. It was so relieving that he left all these matters of public dispute, government, resource allocation, to the central AI server of the planet that allocated resources according to each one's need. What sense did it make that one billion people discussed about how to feed one billion people. Democracy seemed like the most inefficient solution to man's problems, it should have been far more easy to pick a guy and dump all your worries onto his head with truckloads of money. Still, the Indians seemed to have found a way to make the system work!
As I walked out of Stirling castle towards Loch Lomond, I wondered about how we tend to stereotype people, nations, systems as bad or good because it is the easy option, the lazy option. We think the systems and cultures we are born into are ideal only because we are most comfortable with them. If you keep asking yourself the question 'why' to any of your quirky preferences, you will ultimately come to a point where you shrug your shoulders and say, well, that's how we do it. What if we got snowed under and a new civilization built itself on top of us. Would they still think our systems were cool? Would they still think of our computers as efficient for our time? Our cultures, our habits, our quirky ways of life that hold immense meaning for us and hardly any meaning for others - would they just scoff at this? For that matter, would they even care?