WEEKLY WHINE

Reason in the outside world

Try the following: Choose about twenty people randomly from the global population. With them, go to some predetermined location where lodging, food, and information are all provided for you. You can bring along anything you like, but there are going to be many things that you won't need to survive. Newspapers will be delivered daily, as will your mail and parcels [okay, they will arrive several days late, and the parcels are likely to be broken along the way]. If you're wondering about how much this would cost, don't - make your parents worry about it. These twenty people are going to be the only ones with whom you'll interact. There will be a few hundred others present, but for the most part, they're the supporting cast.

Would you go insane?

If your answer was no, you're well on the way to experiencing the life we lead here. We have virtually an identical situation, except that nobody is permitted to go insane - the rules forbid it. Whatever magazines to which we subscribe are always obsolete by the time we see them. Whatever interest we have in the news is strictly on a need to know basis. We don't need to know if the nation goes to war in the Middle East. We do need to know that the launch of the Mars Climate Orbiter probe was successful. We don't need to know the latest escapades of our President. We do need to know who won the ME72 contest.

And we ignore the outside world. Who needs it? The only things it provides for us are doughnuts, The Simpsons, and whatever food we eat. We can do just fine on our own, thank you. Remember all that television you used to watch? All the movies you could recite line by line? All the sports you used to follow so closely? They're gone. Do you care?

If you care, you might not like it here. Or maybe you'll still remain in contact with the outside world but pay for it when grades come out and you flame. If you do flame, please be so kind as to prevent the door from hitting you on the way out. Actually, you're welcome at any time if you used to be one of us, as long as you don't try to live here or anything like that. If you do, you will suffer the wrath of something. This usually involves tasty spices.

Sometimes, we have our disagreements. Sometimes, we're forced to bring something to the higher-ups, who become involved in some way or another because someone asked them to do so. Sometimes, we prevent things from reaching the higher-ups, who often wind up taking all the fun out of things simply because someone asked them to do so. Sometimes, bad things happen to bad people. Sometimes, bad things happen to good people. Either way, we're powerless to stop it.

Ironically, we, as a group, are probably some of the most empowered people you'll find anywhere, at least among people without large salaries, expense accounts, and pension schemes. We have an agreement under which the aforementioned higher-ups leave us alone if we leave them alone - ie, if their insurance providers don't bother them, they don't bother us. This is why it's such a danger when one of us asks them to step in, because it really hurts all of us in the long run by taking power out of our hands, a little bit at a time.

This sort of thing has happened in many other places, but the process is so much slower here, mainly because we're on a need to know basis with the rest of the world. For all intents and purposes, there is no outside world - it's only a fiction that explains what happens when you stray too far in any direction. It would be just you, those twenty people, the supporting cast, and the food from who knows where.

And you know something? That's the way we like it.