You Don't Exist
A Story about Utopia
Part One
Jack was the seventh boy. The tenth child.
Breakthroughs in fertility technology had made large families the norm again, especially now that childbirth was no longer as painful or as dangerous as it had been in the dark days of previous centuries. Families had to be larger these days, since those assigned to be mothers and fathers had to make up for the citizens who hadn't been assigned to be mothers and fathers.
Jack didn't see much of his parents. They had been selected to be parents because of their genetic potential, not because they were assessed as having good caregiving skills. There were daycares for that – later, teachers. Everyone had a role, and at every stage of children's development, there were citizens to care for them and teach them and prepare them for the roles they would be given upon turning eighteen. New screening technologies identified a child's potential talents quite early, and there was no longer any burden of decision. Gone were the dark days in which adolescents had faced endless pressure to compete for selective spots at prestigious universities, where they would be forced to choose from a dizzying array of options, all while attempting to stand out from the crowd of other adolescents trying to do the same thing. Today everyone was fully integrated into a holistic social order from birth to death. Jack would never have to fend for himself. He would never be plagued with existential angst about whether he had chosen the right path. He would never have to worry about which type of bread to eat, because every community only needed one.
If Jack ever traveled to a village in another part of the country, he might taste a different variety of bread. He knew that there was regional variation, and that the bread far to the north was black and bitter. He'd only ever tasted sour bread with white flour on top of the crust.
But it didn't do to wonder too much about black breads and lands to the north, because citizens of the nation rarely had a need to travel any farther than the next village over. There were poor souls who did need to travel, generally those selected early on for their potential talent in administrative or military affairs. They were lonely souls, although they never traveled alone. It was said that they had a camaraderie with others who shared their station, that anyone who served in an administrative office anywhere could come into a town and immediately befriend the local administrators there.
There was always some distance between the locals anywhere and the administrators who served them. The clerks who represented the government, even those who had grown up in the towns where they served, always maintained a remove from the local population. Even in a holistic society in which everyone was well cared for, there was sometimes a need for impartiality. Especially since what the parties most feared was corruption. There was, of course, local law enforcement, and even in a well-integrated society, there was occasionally crime. But the offenders were always promptly removed from their community and taken somewhere to be treated.
Everyone knew that there was no such thing as a bad person, but there were mental health problems. Sometimes, a mental health condition could cause someone to take an action that would harm themselves or others. With the elimination of inequality and discrimination, many of the causes of crime had been eliminated. But misfiring brain circuitry, or other psychiatric conditions, could sometimes cause theft, or even murder. In many cases, the perpetrators were placed under house arrest and given a period of mandatory psychological therapy to decondition them. In the worst cases, they were taken away and they were given some sort of course of treatment which was only whispered about. Then, after a time, they would be returned to their villages. They would be a little different. More agreeable. Usually quiet. But pleasant. And unlikely ever again to cause trouble. The parties didn't like trouble.
The parties who formed the coalition government represented all the various interests in society. They held different positions on important questions and they made compromises in the legislature. Voting, that anachronistic institution from an earlier time, had been done away with. Too often, it had resulted in the wrong sort of people being selected for government, people with no special talent for politics. These days, children identified early as having a particular talent for politics were selected for one of the parties at age thirteen, after which they would be trained in all the various processes and procedures they would need to understand to effectively govern the nation.
Jack was identified early as having particular talent for orthodontics. At various points in his schooling, he was told he would or would not need to understand a certain subject. And then he was assigned only to the classes which would be relevant to his future career. Once, when he was fourteen, he asked if he could take a music class. But he was told that he likely didn't have any talent for music, and besides there were only a certain number of musicians needed in any given age cohort, and his cohort already had enough. He was still required to take history classes, which all students were required to take. But these were short and primarily consisted of stories of national pride and solidarity. Children learned enough to know that they were lucky to live in an age where loneliness and atomization had been banished. Prior eras had been marked by such strife and division, and nobody was taken care of. People had to look out for themselves.
When he was eighteen, he took his first orthodontics class. He decided he didn't like it much, but he was told he would learn to like it, and he accepted this. It was only when he turned twenty, and completed his education in orthodontics, that he had any real second thoughts.
Jack wasn't sure what to make of these thoughts. He felt that he didn't want to be an orthodontist, but he didn't know what it meant that he felt that way. He also didn't know what he did want to be. Jack had never heard of anyone deciding they didn't want to perform their assigned role. He didn't know if it was possible to do something else. He didn't want to ask any of his friends about this, because he knew it was frowned upon for people to talk about their personal feelings. Everyone knew that feeling was to be viewed with suspicion. Any thought that came to a man or woman or child alone was suspect. It was only in groups that truth could be discerned. He probably wasn't really feeling any reservations about orthodontics. It was probably his imagination. After all, who was he to know what he did or didn't want?
Jack knew that in the dark days, people had been very unhappy. They had spent all their time thinking about personal feelings. It had made them sick. He knew that happiness was not something personal, but only something which existed in the context of one’s place in society. He had read the great epic poems of Greece and Scandinavia, and he knew that personal feelings were not always a feature of human life, but had been invented by radical philosophers who wanted to overturn the old social orders and turn every person into an atom unto him- or herself. He knew that the mark of a good citizen was the ability to ignore personal feeling.
In school, they had watched a film version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and they had learned that this was Hamlet’s downfall. He hadn’t accepted his role in Denmark or the fate which had been chosen for him, but had insisted for all of the play on exploring the inner workings of his own mind. His mother had known her place, but it had taken him five acts to know his. In the end, it was too late.
Hamlet was still taught because it was evidence of the radical shift which began during the medieval period and had its culmination in the twenty-first century. It was possible within the play to see the first glimmerings of the poisoned seed which would bear its deadly fruit over four centuries later.
Though born into a world in which morality and purpose are a given, and not something to be discovered for oneself, Hamlet is infected with the idea that he matters – separate and apart from the context in which he is born – and that he has a personality which is distinct from the roles in which he operates. He is plagued by indecision, because he has been taught at university the new ideas about consent and autonomy. And this, of course, leads to his ruin, as well as the ruin of the society into which he was born and which it was his duty to uphold.
Jack had enjoyed this film, and he had heard that Shakespeare had written other plays as well, but he had never had an opportunity to view any of them.
So Jack accepted his lot, as all of the heroes had in all of the stories they had learned in history class. He didn't want to be like one of the villains of those stories, those selfish individuals who placed their own ideas about right and wrong over the common good. He didn't much like working as an orthodontist, but he kept at it for four years. The days were long and at night he found himself tired. But when he was twenty-four, he was assigned a wife. He was glad he didn't have to bother finding one for himself as people had to do in the dark days of the past. He never would have found the time with his work schedule.
Everyone knew that love was the product of marriage, not marriage the product of love. Jack had learned in school that the crisis of marriage, which had peaked in the middle of the twenty-first century, had been driven by a mistaken idea that marriage should be about consent. Consent was the poison pill. It had been introduced in ancient societies, before the dark days, and it had gradually corrupted the nations of the world, until it culminated in the near-destruction of the institution of marriage. Divorce, abuse, illegitimate children, and unhappiness had been the key features of the dark days.
But now, marriages were arranged within each community. The people who knew each community member best were understood to be in a better position to select a good marriage partner for that person than he or she could be.
The woman Jack married was also twenty-four. She had a fair face, with a small nose and a quick smile. Jack didn't know her, but they grew to like each other very much and they were happy together. She worked as a therapist. Her name was Alice.
They were married for two years and in that time Jack always fulfilled his duties as a husband. They joined several local sporting clubs and they were members in good standing at their church. Jack was inducted into a local fraternity and Alice was asked to join a book club for women. Life went very smoothly in those years, and they grew fond of one another.
But when Jack was twenty-six, a patient at his orthodontic practice died. Nobody knew why, and it was presumed to be of natural causes because the man was ninety-nine and in poor health. But there was an investigation and very quickly it was determined that the shock and anger in the local community would not be relieved until it was found out who was to blame. The dead man had been well-liked.
One Thursday morning, when the sun had nearly climbed to its vernal zenith, several uniformed officers came into the practice where Jack worked. They waited until he was finished with a surgery and then told him he was to come with them. They showed their identification, and he knew they were national police. Not wanting to upset anyone, Jack asked some of his colleagues to take on his patients for the rest of the day. He followed the men to their hovercar, and unhesitatingly climbed into the back.
He assumed they wanted to ask him questions about what had happened. He could answer with a clear conscience that the man who died had been weak in the heart and had collapsed without warning. He had taken a general medicine class where he had learned that the first sign of a heart attack for twenty-five percent of victims was sudden death.
Jack was surprised when they drove outside the city, down past the wharf to a row of gray cinder buildings. The hovercar parked outside one of them and he was marched inside and taken to what appeared to be a holding cell. It was only then that he noticed the laser pistols on the officers’ hips.
He was made to sit in a chair and a smiling man with a white mustache came into the room and sat opposite him. The officers remained standing.
“Do you know why you are here?” asked the man with the mustache. He added that his name was Yencl.