This book offers humor as a homeopathic therapy for political anxiety disorders. You should try it before turning yourself in to the big pharma.
The book explores a situation which may very well come true after future presidential elections. Imagine a winning candidate—everyone’s darling—who has magically combined the most popular ideas from the left and the right.
The novel is a bit philosophical. Many attempts have been made to create societies that would rely on human virtues like love, trust, and respect. But none of these experiments ever got larger than the size of a kibbutz. The problem is that a society in which everyone is honest and caring creates ideal conditions for people who want to take advantage of others. All these so-called “honor systems” collapsed as soon as the “rotten apples” got organized into a gang—or a political party.
On the other hand, societies that expect humans to act sinfully have proven to be pretty resilient. Take capitalism, which runs on greed—camouflaged as free market competition—and socialism, which exploits jealousy—sold as a desire for equality.
The characters of this book noticed that the Internet and social media created many new ways to sin and therefore decided to establish a new society in which behavior would be driven by sins less harmful than greed and jealousy, such as peeping on others, hogging attention, and rendering unsolicited opinions on matters no one understands.
The sincere efforts of these characters to build heaven on earth are interrupted by various obstacles, which they try to overcome by testing social innovations on monkeys, implementing a government-controlled afterlife, and taking legal actions against nature.
Their creative thinking leads to unorthodox solutions to the world’s problems: An anti-terrorism foreign policy based on promoting porn watching in the hotbeds of terrorism. Institutionalized drunkenness. An artificial intelligence that operates on four-letter words.
Finally, the characters formulate the revolutionary Principle of Certainty, which determines an outcome of any collective effort and has an important political corollary: the public at large cannot agree on what’s right and at the same time be right about it.
The book explores a situation which may very well come true after future presidential elections. Imagine a winning candidate—everyone’s darling—who has magically combined the most popular ideas from the left and the right.
The novel is a bit philosophical. Many attempts have been made to create societies that would rely on human virtues like love, trust, and respect. But none of these experiments ever got larger than the size of a kibbutz. The problem is that a society in which everyone is honest and caring creates ideal conditions for people who want to take advantage of others. All these so-called “honor systems” collapsed as soon as the “rotten apples” got organized into a gang—or a political party.
On the other hand, societies that expect humans to act sinfully have proven to be pretty resilient. Take capitalism, which runs on greed—camouflaged as free market competition—and socialism, which exploits jealousy—sold as a desire for equality.
The characters of this book noticed that the Internet and social media created many new ways to sin and therefore decided to establish a new society in which behavior would be driven by sins less harmful than greed and jealousy, such as peeping on others, hogging attention, and rendering unsolicited opinions on matters no one understands.
The sincere efforts of these characters to build heaven on earth are interrupted by various obstacles, which they try to overcome by testing social innovations on monkeys, implementing a government-controlled afterlife, and taking legal actions against nature.
Their creative thinking leads to unorthodox solutions to the world’s problems: An anti-terrorism foreign policy based on promoting porn watching in the hotbeds of terrorism. Institutionalized drunkenness. An artificial intelligence that operates on four-letter words.
Finally, the characters formulate the revolutionary Principle of Certainty, which determines an outcome of any collective effort and has an important political corollary: the public at large cannot agree on what’s right and at the same time be right about it.
