The Weight of Numbers

Arthur Shuey

4/02

It was like the evolution of clothes washing. As soon as somebody slipped on a mossy rock, grunted inarticulately, fell into a river, went over a waterfall and washed up on the banks below deader than last week's mastodon but with his crude, hide garments cleaner than said mastodon's skeleton when the eagles, hyenas, jackals, vultures, rats, mice and ants were through with it, people figured out that clothes could be cleaned by beating them against rocks in the river. After that, people being people, it only took another 24,000 years for them to figure out that they could take the clothes off before cleaning them that way.

Making things work opportunistically and pragmatically is a natural human gift. Fine-tuning solutions to make them painless, simple, predictable and truly efficient requires less common human traits, like analytic ability, reason, patience and intelligence. Many people would interject at this point that time is another mandatory requirement. A majority of contributors would probably suggest that judiciously gathered groups of experts are also useful in solving the larger, more persistent problems of our species. Yes, based on the fact that committees are formed so often to work on mankind's various crucial dilemmas, one must conclude that the majority of human beings believe them to be good for that sort of thing, what with majority rule permeating daily life and everything.

Once upon a time, there was an isolated civilization that grew up by itself, but much as the outside world was growing up, in brief, a microcosm of the world. In accordance with common patterns, this civilization maintained itself and grew with the principle of "majority rule," which is somehow different from the principle of "might is right." There came a time, for example, when a decision had to be made concerning allocation of road building resources, the debate being on whether to create sturdy, lasting, straight roads between the civilization's two largest cities or to link the dozens of towns and villages as well as possible. As most of the population resided in the pair of metropolises, the vote went their way, and each community, regardless of size or location, was accessed manpower or material contributions to build roads linking the two cities.

Regardless of location, however, everyone in the country had to eat. In times of scarcity, the poor roads in the nation's country districts led to difficulty in getting produce and meat to the city markets, and that in turn led to terrible famine. The cities, of course, were still home to the bulk of the nation's population, and the government tried to be responsive to their needs. A new agricultural agency was formed to explore new means of stimulating markets. In the short term, this led to requisitions and even confiscations in rural districts. Draft animals were impressed, along with their owners, to get the food wagons to the cities at any cost, and the majority's crisis was ended.

Among the minority, however, new crises were created. Agricultural agents from the cities, unaware of traditional practices, had sometimes taken seed stores and the animals needed to prepare the soil and plant crops. Consequently, famine returned the next year, and this time it struck the whole country instead of just the cities. Indeed, the smaller towns and villages, lacking the urban majority's political voice, received no relief whatsoever, and many farming communities disappeared.

Naturally, disproportionate population declines outside the cities meant that the cities enjoyed a wider margin of majority rule thereafter, though there was less and less actual enjoyment about it. The country eroded despite the government's best efforts, for "best" was defined within the context of majority approval. As time went on, fortunes were made and lost, useful inventions extended lifespan and comfort for everyone, and progress proceeded in its usual, jagged course up most charts. At the same time, though, there was an inexplicable, continuous decline in quality of life, in population and in hope.

Regardless of how many government programs, corporate successes and individual achievements the press trumpeted to the people, they were less and less stirred by progress. After a hundred years, only half as many votes were there to be counted as there had been in the early road debate referenced above, and no matter what triumphs they voted for, those roads grew more and more potholed.

More time passed, and government actions became, if not indisputably desperate, at least pragmatic to a degree the electorate's more confident, stronger-spined grandparents would have never accepted. Civilization drew inward, abandoning outlying areas and fringe industries by mandate, husbanding and allocating shrinking resources as advised by the best think tanks the nation could assemble. Finite amounts of time were bought, but what were once mere concerns became problems, then dangers. There came a day when the two shrunken cities were the only population centers left in the country. Outside, one found only hermits, adventurers, thieves and authorized foraging parties.

Another decade passed, and an important issue came to a vote. Presented with a choice between maintaining the old highway and maintaining the larger of the two cities, the majority, being residents of said larger city, voted for the latter course of action. With this precedent in place, the city amputated various suburbs and districts as they were deemed irreparable. Severed citizens, cast out, left without rights to government services ranging from police protection to health care, electricity to water, wandered into the wilderness to a fate their cousins neither reported nor discussed.

Pragmatism became desperation; desperation became panic. "If we can just pinpoint public will and follow it correctly, we can solve this," opined the electorate, clutching at the basis for communal action that had underlain so many triumphant headlines throughout their civilization's history. As the value of consensus inflated, factions and demagogues competed for it more stridently.

Conditions spiraled downward into increasing darkness in inverse proportion to the rising pedestal on which the principle of majority rule was fanatically followed. There came a time when two and four-legged scavengers routinely gathered under the midtown fortress walls at dawn, knowing that gruesomely hacked bodies, losers of the previous night's "election," would be tossed to them.

Shrinkage of resources, population and defensible space continued, and a blood cult devoted to identifying, honoring and obeying the mystic Consensus took control of the Block that remained. Their rituals devolved into chants, symbolic acts, human sacrifices and drug-induced exaltations all searching a spirit world to determine the WeightWish, the divine plan for salvation backed by most of the Ancestors. One night, as the High Priest staggered, exhausted and hallucinating, his congregation's chant competing in his mind with the echoes of his footsteps, down a hallway that now only he inhabited, a flash of inspiration struck.

It occurred to him that his body weighed far more than his head. Still deep in his sacred trance state, he turned his feet to the storeroom, found tools that had belonged to a carpenter sacrificed some time prior, built a simple guillotine, and ...