The DNA Of God: Part 2
The Election Commissioner of the Meritocratic Republic of India adjusted his mike in the dressing area. This election had been 15 years in the making. The science and technology had taken a couple months. Secure links and cables feeding automatic genomic sequence data into the central computer and a sorting of Truth values from highest to lowest. The psychology, sociology, and ethics had taken a couple years. In that time the ghost of Galton’s nature vs nurture debate was finally put to rest, much to the annoyance of evolutionary psychologists and endocrinologists who after decades of saying exactly the same thing had to radically change teams out of spite when the public consensus came around to their original view thanks to champions that weren’t them. Nature prescribed not just the ability to be nurtured but the extent to which nurture could nurture. And yet it wasn’t deterministic. If it were, everyone would have 25000 truth values. When the idea of a meritocratic republic was first floated, using the number of truth values of an individual as his merit score, it was the Communist Bloc who were fervently against it. Their position globally had been whittled down to very few bastions, known to the international politburo as the Red Redemption, and to the Global Technocratic Alliance as (sic) the rotting abscess of the planet. The CB commissioned a detailed study of the genomic truth values through a Marxist lens of class struggle, socio-economic oppression and the monopolistic privilege of the elite. It’s much easier to self-actualize when you’re given a stable home, a good education, proper nutrition, and a pony for your 5th birthday. Meanwhile, since there was no law against it, the GTA federation of companies quietly began inserting genomic truth testing as primary methodologies for hiring, firing and promotion.
The CB report was ready. The data were conclusive. The research team stood up in front of the screen with a suspicious smugness. There was a clear correlation between social class and the number of truth values, they began with the sort of cheap misleading tactic that made for a big subversive shock reveal but whose manipulative showiness later would be recollected with some resentment. The joke was on them. The CB declared the meeting closed. They hadn’t come for explanations. They had just come for the confirmation of their views and the citation number for the research paper they could attach to their manifestos. They were already on their phones, dictating citation numbers and academic author credentials to their printers, when their attention was caught by the rising panic of the research team. The lead researcher looked adequately sheepish now as he cleared his throat and hemmed and hawed his way through communicating that perhaps there had been maybe just the tiniest misunderstanding, conceivably, it seemed. What they had meant was, and in hindsight it was now apparent to him that their phrasing might have been misleading, the correlation actually went in the opposite direction of the initial hypothesis. There was a neat inverse correlation. Deprived classes had much higher truth values than the most affluent. In the stunned silence that followed, the research team surreptitiously pulled out their phones behind their backs, texting loved ones their last words, and leaving instructions for the care of dogs, children, and browsing histories.
They were being needlessly dramatic of course. They were not going to be taken behind the shed and shot. That was ridiculous. They would be celebrated. The general secretary beamed brightly, like an interrogation lamp. This was a momentous finding. After all, the CB had always been the most vocal supporter of the meritocratic revolution that will finally elevate the proletariat to their rightful places of well-deserved power. It was just that they could not have said so openly. That would have played into the cunning machinations of the GTA bourgeoisie overlords. There was no way the GTA would allow the meritocratic republic of India to come into being. So they would pretend to be in favor of it, while secretly working to undermine it from within, clip its wings before it ever got off the ground. So the CB had pretended to be against it, secretly working to undermine the underminers. Now they had proof. It was time for revolution.
Meanwhile the CEO and CXO of federated Indian GTA sweated nervously in front of the Corporate Accountability Board Administrative Leadership. It had initially been called the Corporate Accountability Board Administration Group, but there had been wide complaints that it didn’t sound evil enough and there had even been a couple of positive articles sighted in the popular ideological magazines, which had been creating a lot of bad press. Their title was swiftly changed to CABAL. They further insisted it be in red font on a black background, to bring to mind the most evil political entity in living memory, the DMK. Against this chilling reminder of a darker past stood a quivering CEO and CXO waiting to squeak out their findings to the board once their wheely chairs swiveled slowly around. So it would appear, the CEO hemmed and hawed, perhaps there had been a slight miscalculation in assuming that genomic truth values would allegedly correlate with absolute output and productivity, ostensibly, it seemed. So, began the chairman of the board, waiting for all the other chairs to swivel to face him before continuing, it is your considered finding that hiring, promoting and retraining peasants from the great unwashed turned out to be, against all sense common, uncommon and assorted, a catastrophic and wholly bewildering failure? Certainly not, the CXO began with the sunny optimism of an amnesiac on death row, our pipeline of high quality talent is the strongest in history, attrition is down to a record low, work ethic and morale have never been higher, employee satisfaction is excellent, and teams are reporting more cross-functional collaboration and creative problem-solving. The CEO looked at him aghast, mouth agape. No, assuredly those weren’t the focus performance indicators that the CEO had aligned the organization under, and the CXO merely had a strange sense of humor, and no he wasn’t a meritocratic action hire they would obviously never do such a thing for positions that actually mattered. Obviously, said the chairman, lacing his fingers together. The CEO and CXO began to feel around in the darkness, lowering their center of gravity such that when the trapdoor opened they might be able to straddle the chimney. They were being needlessly dramatic of course. They were taken behind the shed and shot.
The CABAL needed to do an embarrassing public volte-face on the whole pesky meritocracy nonsense, it wasn’t going to be easy. Volte-faces were excellent for reputational indeterminacy but terrible for business. They sat on the problem for a while. Then the CB came out publicly accusing the CABAL and the GTU of deviously pretending to be pro-meritocracy while knowing full well its destructive potential and therefore sabotaging its revolutionary capabilities using underhanded means. The CABAL admitted the game was up and there was no need to hide what had been their position all along, utter derision and contempt for the idea of a meritocratic republic of India. They decried the destabilizing corruptible farce of meritocracy and vowed to purge it from their system.
The high-truth comrades within the GTU were livid. Not with the CABAL but with the CB. They assumed the CABAL couldn’t care less about the meritocracy but were only changing sides because the CB had aligned with the meritocratic republic and could certainly not be trusted to do anything right, meaning even a bad idea that was opposed to the CB would turn out to be an inadvertently good one. They, who made up the most dynamic faction of the CB, broke away to form the CAMF, Communists Against Meritocratic Fascism, building increasingly convincing cases for the equivalence of meritocracy and fascism. The CB, perhaps from a sense of pragmatism that the cream of their revolutionary army had defected, preferred the idea of a CAMF and through a process of quiet drip-fed defection simply disbanded the CB altogether before the CAMF could adequately react. Thus was the idea of a meritocratic republic put to rest.
Until Swami Satyaguna picked up the mantle and made meritocracy a religion. He unearthed ancient texts that revealed the ability of pre-Vedic sages to use their powerful accumulated tapas energy to perfectly evaluate the truth-values of a human being. The cycle of rebirth was none other than the repetition of a math exercise until all the answers were correct, until the human form of the eternal Brahman achieved his full potential, saw through the veil of Maya to the Atman within, and had 25000 truth values, upon which he transcended this plane and escaped the wheel of rebirth. This was known. And then forgotten. It was the British who made them forget. They were distracted by shiny objects like railroads, fizzy drinks, and that ingenious honeytrap — C++, and left their spiritual path behind. But now Swami Satyaguna, through decades of contemplation and communion with the Atman, had seen through to the nature of truth and reality, and he would make them see as well. And they did. They began to be called the Moksha Army. The worldwide cult of Maslowism promptly pledged allegiance to the Moksha Army, having sorely lacked the scripture needed to legitimize their penurious religious canon consisting of 5 books by Abraham Maslow and a phone-recording of a MOOC about Positive Psychology that had been taken down after being thoroughly debunked.
The MA was massively successful in a theocratic wave across India, and the MA Party quickly gained a majority in both houses of Parliament. It was them keeping their manifesto promise that finally led to the first election to be held for what would officially be christened the Meritocratic Republic Of India. The MA wanted to call it the Meritheocratic Republic, but infighting broke out with one faction saying it was too clever by half, another saying it was too clever by half to say it was too clever by half, another saying it wasn’t clever enough, and another insisting they should all write their preferred name and then do a genomic sequence test to see if any truth-value had flipped.
And so the election commissioner waited for the results, watched online by 2 billion people. The 1000 positions were read out by the computer along with the corresponding truth-value number. The excitement began to build. The cut-off was very high. With each name there was a display of the person’s standing, achievements, and truth-value string. There were many ties, and tie-breaker criteria had been presciently set based on particular truth-value bits that correlated most closely with internationally available databases of the most high-performance individuals across the world. The final 10 positions were being read out. The competition here was concurrently fierce, the prestige jumps were exponential, as well as relaxed, the truth-values were so high that these individuals no longer felt they had anything to prove to anybody but themselves. Number 9, truth-value 12430! That was spectacularly high!
8: 12432
3: 12450
2: 12451
That’s all it came to at these high numbers, a single truth-value here or there. The nation, and indeed the whole world, held its breath as the number 1 position was to be called out. The MA was convinced it would be Swami Satyaguna, surely the man who had transcended his own consciousness and seen through to the eternal realms was as close to divinity as humanity had reached.
The picture of a young woman came up on screen. There was much cheering.
1: 24999
She was asked to make her public address and formally open the republic. She smiled and proclaimed the inauguration of the first Meritocratic Republic Of India, and humbly accepted the role of Prime Meritocrat.
The election commissioner had tears in his eyes. All that effort over the past 15 years. He went back to the computer to check his own sequence. Surely, now that the election was a resounding success and the MRI a reality, his own truth-values would have taken a huge jump. Strangely, the computer had already booted up and was churning out a sequence value.
Correction
1: 25000
The Prime Meritocrat disappeared into thin air.
