| Whatever Happened To The Ancient Hangañian Civilization? | |
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| | One of the questions we frequently get here in VitoSpace is, "So, what happened to this Ancient Hangañian civilization you keep talking about?" If you've been asking that question, the answer lies in the story of one of the great heroes of Hangañian civilization, the woman known as A. Nagular Squentch. She started life as a simple but nonetheless very bright farm girl—little Anabimptula Feeznia Squentch, named after her maternal and paternal grandmothers, respectively...and of course, respectfully. She was always quick to point that out. She had been taught that respect for one's elders was a good thing, a quality that was decreasingly common in her contemporary world of increasingly decreasing respect for the traditions upon which the former greatness of Heptoonica had been built. Indeed, of all the provinces of the once-proud Kingdom of Hangañia, Heptoonica had long been the mainstay of traditional Hangañian culture. To be sure, Hangañia had been a long-established civilization whose durability was in part attributable to its ubiquitous mindset of respect for tradition, including a nearly universal...well, not exactly reverence for their ancestral forbears; it was more like a general awareness of the fact that everything they called progress was a direct result of knowledge that had been discovered by those on whose shoulders they stood. You know—gratitude for value received. It's pretty much a mutant concept in today's culture, but the Ancient Hangañian culture had a handle on it, mostly thanks to the principles laid down in the Hangañian Book of Wisdom, authored by the venerable King Smamptizeen bo'Nattomy, who is credited with having founded the Kingdom of Hangañia. Consequently, Hangañia somehow had the good fortune to have had a reasonably ubiquitous cultural awareness of gratitude as a key component of the engine of progress... ...well, at least initially. Alas, as with all cultures that have not experienced tueoctafgoticoat (the universal elevation of consciousness that arises from grokkage of the inter-connectedness of all things), Hangañia eventually entered the inevitable period of civilizational decline. It was a condition that did not escape the growing awareness of young Anabimptula Feeznia Squentch. Even as a pre-pubescent schoolgirl, she had been horrified to hear the brash and brazen disrespect of those classmates (...boys, usually, and the Bad Girls who hung around with them...the ones who used a lot of eye make-up) who deliberately mispronounced their own nation's name, placing the accent on the second rather than the third syllable. The very sound of "Hang-GAIN-ee-ya" had the same effect as a vigorous scrubbing of the surface of her brain with a wire brush, followed by an application of pig urine to the scrubbed area. At least, that's the way she imagined it. To offset that irritation, she had trained her mind to silently scream "Hang-an-YEE-a" into her consciousness as a remedy to her insulted sensibilities every time she heard the "Hang-GAIN-ee-ya" abomination. And she viewed such disrespect as clear evidence of the generally declining cultural integrity of which she became increasingly aware as her growing consciousness rapidly outpaced her growing physiology. Of course, as a young girl, little Anabimptula knew nothing about tueoctafgoticoat, whose absence invariably manifests itself as an unquestioned, universal belief in the necessity of the political state, a virtually ubiquitous belief that "somebody has to be in charge"—meaning, of course, that some system of artificial laws enforced by legalized coercion is the essential element upon which "civilization" is founded. The assumption is that you can't have civilization without government (true), and you can't have government without some form of political state (false). In the Kingdom of Hangañia, the state took the form of a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliamentary legislature, over whose statutes the king had absolute veto authority, a power that the legislature shared with respect to the king's proclamations and edicts. The resulting tit-for-tat naysaying and vetoing between the king and the parliament generally meant that they seldom agreed on anything, and while they were busy squabbling over laws and edicts, most of which were not enacted, the Hangañian citizens busied themselves with the business of ensuring their own prosperity, built on voluntary interactions, for the most part unencumbered by the interference of the state. Nevertheless, occasionally some legislation and royal edicts did survive the political squabbling, and became law. And so, despite the many centuries of peace and prosperity enjoyed by the gradually advancing Hangañian civilization, the inevitable accumulation of laws and edicts was beginning to take its civilizational toll. And therein lies the problem, as much a threat to Ancient Hangañia as it remains to every extant civilization on Planet Earth today. No matter how else you view it, spin it, rationalize it, or justify it, there is only one inescapably logical fact that remains: Ultimately, a political law can only compel people to do that which they otherwise would not want to do, or forcibly prevent them from doing that which they otherwise would choose to do. The fact that such laws are presumed to be for the common good, and are sanctified as legitimate by a system that is accepted as "not perfect, but better than any other system" does not change the fact that each new law represents a limitation on the freedom of choice of the people it commands and controls. Human society is a complex system. The slowest and surest way to kill a complex system is to limit its degrees of freedom. A system of governance that relies on arbitrary rules enforced by the threat of legalized coercion depends on the fundamental assumption that the solution to every societal problem is another law. By its very continued existence, such a system can only accumulate laws. Given enough time, the inevitable endpoint of such a system is that everything that is not required is forbidden. Long before it reaches that level of tyranny, the society that embraces such a system experiences a predictable strangulation of the freedom of its citizenry, and an accompanying breakdown in social order. When the ability of people to interact voluntarily, without interference by an uninvited third party (the state), is encumbered by such interference, human nature kicks in. People try to find ways around it. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law. Thus begins the downward spiral into civilizational instability. By its nature as a command and control mechanism, the state reacts with more restrictions, further compounding the antagonism between the rulers and those they rule. The resulting inevitable societal instability is the seedbed of the equally predictable civilizational decline. Social order gives way to societal entropy. That was the increasingly unstable society into which little Anabimptula Feeznia Squentch was born, and by the time her brilliantly simple and straightforward adolescent brain figured it out, she wasn't happy about it. Actually, that's a bit of an understatement. She flat-out bitched about it. "We've gotta fix this!", she would say, but even those who agreed had no idea what to do about it. Neither did Anabimptula, at that point; but that didn't keep her from bitching and griping to everyone who would listen, and endlessly nagging those who wouldn't. That prompted her wise-ass schoolmates who said "Hang-GAIN-ee-ya" to start calling her "Nagula". She was pretty sure that the Nagula thing was started by that perpetual pain in the ass Nastipone Vemptyit and his insolent, impudent, bitchbox girlfriend Assney Flinxt. Well, she wasn't about to stand for that shit. She decided to shove the Nagula thing right back in their faces. The day she reached the Official Age of Nubility (13), she marched down to the Royal Registry and legally changed her name to A. Nagular Squentch. The school was legally obligated to use her legal name, and every one of the wise-ass punks no longer were able to derive any satisfaction from the Nagula thing. Every time they tried to taunt her with, "Hey Nagula...", she just grinned and replied, "Yes. Thank you for acknowledging my true name. Do you need my help with something?" She shut those bastidges up right quick. Yes...it was tough growing up in Hangañia during those declining years of the Hangañian civilization. But enduring and ultimately triumphing over the trials and tribulations of those formative years is just a part of what built the character and intellect of A. Nagular Squentch. As we now know, she went on to discover the principle of tueoctafgoticoat, from which she derived the true purpose of government, which eventually enabled the Hangañian civilization to kick its addiction to the success-proof belief that the political state is the only way to achieve actual government—a transformation that reversed Hangañia's perilous civilizational decline, and ultimately led to Hangañia's escape from the universal insanity of the rest of Planet Earth to establish the first interstellar civilization. And that's what happened to Ancient Hangañia, boys and girls. They're gone! And you can bet they didn't accomplish that by renouncing all gratitude to the shoulders on which they stood, not the least of which were the shoulders of the great A. Nagular Squentch. |
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