I was feeling oddly inspired today, so I wrote a brief little parable. Enjoy?
Perhaps the greatest and most controversial invention ever to come out of the laboratories of Invent-o-Smart was the Greed Detector. This remarkable device possessed the ability to accurately analyze, to sixty decimal places, exactly how much greed factored into the actions of the person it was used upon. The company heralded it as the most promising invention ever, which would allow humankind to finally and truly overcome corruption, shortsighted policy-making, and dandruff build-up. Unfortunately, not only did the device not solve any of these problems, but it also ended up causing an awful lot more problems just by being announced.
The moment the device was filed for patent, it was simultaneously banned, outlawed, and deemed a capital offense deserving of the death penalty in every single government on the planet. All knowledge concerning its existence was erased, the laboratory that it was invented in was burned to the ground, and just for good measure, everything in a 100-mile radius of the laboratory was also burned to the ground. After sixteen tactical nuclear strikes on the site and an extensive campaign to systematically deny any nuclear strikes took place, the governments of the world finished the operation by dismantling Invent-o-Smart and summarily executing everybody on the staff and (for good measure) everybody they were related to, friends with, or whom they had had any contact with in the last 165 years.
The end result of this brutal massacre left the world population greatly decreased and led to an incredible revolution against the world's governments that ultimately resulted in new governments more or less exactly like the old ones taking control of things. Once people realized that all of this devastation had happened because of a simple patent filing, they promptly vowed that they would never allow a patent to be filed again. Two weeks later the newly elected and newly corrupt politicians revised this, as they realized that copyrights were the only things keeping their funding in place from the ridiculously corrupt businesses that had emerged after the massacre. Instead, they outlawed any and all critical thinking, which went over quite well with most of the remnants of civilization, though not so much with the surviving intellectuals. So the governments of the world just had them all killed.
Although there was never a working model made of the Greed Detector (the prototype never even got tested), and fire, nuclear warheads, and bullets had summarily erased all knowledge of its existence, it was generally agreed that whatever those lunatics were working on must've been very bad indeed. After a brief worldwide forum on the subject during which a lot of obscene gestures and name-calling were thrown about, the people who survived vowed to never think for themselves again. Unfortunately this proved to be a very bad move indeed. Just three days later the Earth was visited by some extraterrestrials that were looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Upon discovering that humanity had vowed to abandon intelligence, they summarily vaporized the whole planet to keep the rest of the galaxy safe.
If there was a moral to this story, the author isn't sure what it was, but is sure that it was probably a really good one.
Note that you can also find this story on my website, http://www.skyrender.net/
If you enjoyed this, let me know. I may share future silly stories here if enough people enjoy them.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
