Aug 16, 2021
Imagine we are sitting, safe in our hamlet of thatched cottages with a forest on one side and a river down below where the coracle is tied. As we wait for the evening fire to catch in the grate, I tell a tale of what I saw that day.
On my way to visit a farmer I came across evidence of road building and when I got to the farm I spoke to a blacksmith who was making something new. He told me of innovations in hubs and spokes. Then I saw iron wheel rims in the corner of his shop. He told me he'd taken lots of orders from the garrison.
Impatient, you interrupted: "What an imagination. They've no use for heavier wheels. They’d sink even faster into the mud on these awful roads, the fools!"
"But they're building more roads," I say.
Another person chips in and says, "It's much easier to go by river. Why would they use wheels just to get stuck in the dirt?"
Because, I say, our town is here and their fort is there, and they want to get from A to B in a straight line. I want to speculate that it would give them much more control and…
… and that I fear the worst but I am forced back into a discussion of the mechanics of hubs, spokes and the limited use for wheels and the wonders of river craft.
Some months later the legion passes by, charting maps and planting a line of wooden stakes as far as the eye can see. The legion puts the populace to work, breaking rocks and grading stone by size and smoothness.
"You, see, they plan to build a network of roads to control us. It won't just be the army with their chariots. They will be able to send out assessors and demand a part of your harvest, and if you resist the tax collector they'll take your farm or haul you to the debtors' gaol."
"That's a conspiracy theory," says the other, dismissing defiantly what he’s not seen and is incapable of imagining. "The chariots they've got couldn't do that. They wouldn't build straight lines all over the place just to wear out horses. Anyway they're here to protect us; the barbarians are waiting.”
Some years later, that other man looked down a row of turnips yet to pick, the empty baskets readied as far as the eye could see. “You know, I would have been sitting down to tea just now, with nothing to do until tomorrow’s milking.”
The hamlet has emptied. The roads brought rumours of plague. Some people fled, others were rounded up by the legion, taken off for testing and never seen again.
Passersby are chary; few will tarry in idle chat. Some say the departed were taken as slaves to work in stockades called factories; others that they were loaded on ships and transported to lands so distant that no one knows their name, except to say, down under.
The moral of the story is: keep your eyes open. When you see something, don’t say something right away. Don’t jump to conclusions. Instead, combine those pieces of information, iron wheels plus cobbled roads, the surveyors with their maps, and work out what it means. Your neighbours may be slow to catch on. They may hear only what the legion tells them: that it's come to keep them safe.
The only logical leap you must make is that someone is constructing a mechanism with new levers of power and they might just use it to increase control. Legions cost money and the only reason to spend it is so the powers can use them as a mechanism to extract more money.
Do not be frustrated if your audience cannot progress beyond the legion's narrative. Or if they cling to established wisdom that the coracle is more comfy than the horse.
You have reached a conclusion based on clear and convincing evidence that your fellow villagers refuse to see. Perhaps their job depends on them not understanding. As with Event Covid, the inability to recognize well-documented facts may be a kind of loyalty test.
Perhaps they have an inkling. They are just not ready to consider the implications of new networks of power and what that will mean for their own loss of control.
If you let them defeat you they will force you to retreat along the continuum of probable cause, until you yield your claims of reasonable doubt. They will reject cause for suspicion of any plan at all. They will drive you back to the point where you grudgingly accede that you have a mere hunch but it was probably a bad dream and you should keep it to yourself.
Another day, and your nightmare forces itself from subconscious, to front of mind, to mouth. Once again you begin, patiently, to reinvent the wheel, explaining that roads enable chariots, enable armies, enable tax collectors, in a lattice of control... as you struggle to convince your listener to make the leap to conclude what it means.
In times of upheaval the first question people should ask is perhaps the last they will answer.
Very well done $ Cirk