Saturday 19th September

-[Of course, kindness was not a rarity; Janek must have been blind not to have seen that our system is riddled with kindness.  In fact, everything runs far better with kindness – we discovered that long ago.  The rich who owned the con-gloms didn’t need to treat everyone so generously, they could have simply taken their money and not given a f**k about anyone else; though the logic of Capital dictates that pretty soon their businesses would run down and eventually they too would have no wealth.  The great realisation was that despite the fact that you could make more profit by running a company with robots and hypercomputers if every company did that then sooner or later there would be no consumers.  It was only with the creation and licensing of the con-gloms that we eliminated competition.  Each con-glom has a monopoly within a defined geographical area; this and the replacement of money with cred, which is truly flexible, means that everyone can be employed; a constant source of consumers, and, so far, stability.

Sorry to keep repeating what should be so blindingly obvious, but it is remarkable how many otherwise intelligent people simply don’t get it.  By removing personal greed, or at least controlling the excesses resulting from its unrestrained usage, we have made life immeasurably better for the vast majority.  The trouble with those old ideas of Communism was that everyone was patently NOT equal, and to attempt to treat people as such will only end in tears.  We understand that people are different, so we have created the strata system, with the ever possible chance of moving up (or down).  In fact, we have to do very little now; the system runs itself.  That modicum of human ambition is enough to keep the young striving for the benefits their elders have already gained.  QED, as Nap (Norman Arthur Phillips, my old math-crammer teacher) would have said, though QED never quite works with people, they have this annoying facility for not behaving in their own best interests.

And already I think one can discern a certain dissatisfaction with Janek’s discovery of just how brutal life in the jungle really can get.  He has come from a safe clean environment where every wish, within reason and strata-level, was fulfilled.   He had a never ending supply of food, (most of it real or very high quality manna) stylish clothing, gadgets, screen entertainment, access to all the libraries the world has ever created.  Oh, and not forgetting, safe drugs for every desired mood change, and the best sex ever.  Janek has just derided syn sex, and compared it to old-fashioned porn.  But we know he was a regular user of level 3 syn, which is nearly the best we have yet devised.  So he is being more than a bit disingenuous.  Syn is far better than old-fashioned sex between people, because the terminal knows exactly what each individual user likes best; there is no need to consider the other person because there is no other person, just a holo-screen image of whoever the user’s mind conjures up as their perfect partner.  And it can last exactly as long as the user wishes, though most do in fact prefer, as in old-fashioned coupling, to come rather quickly, the average time being 7 minutes and 45 seconds for men and considerably quicker for women, (according to the latest stats).

We of course only caught up with Janek a few months later, but when we reviewed his progress on his little antique recording device it is quite obvious that he was already having some doubts about his disastrous decision to reb in the first place.]-