You woke up. Rain drums on your mud-tile ceiling. You’ve been blessed—no more drought. Demeter be praised.
Not anymore. Demeter doesn’t exist, and the weather is a quasi-random process. We know better. No deities are ruling us. Our existence is now administered by the state and its institutions. The government uses scientific reasoning and orthodoxies to rule the nation. We don’t have to pray to Athena for justice—the Law is there instead.
I can’t. I have a report that proves that. Of course, it’s not that I could before and now can’t because of this paper. This paper legitimizes the fact that I can’t—and never could. It’s official. There’s a magical spell on it.
“Wow. So obtuse and indelicate. I see where you’re going with this.”
But this is not a mistake. This paper is the truth. It is only a mistake if whoever cast the spell backtracks on it: a mistake of the representative, not of the entity. We humans are imperfect vessels of our Nation’s will.
“You can’t do that—it’s illegal!”, not “should”, not “mustn’t”; can’t. The magical entity that is the judicial system does not fall from the sky and deliver justice—of course not. No one is that naive. Instead, we go through a lengthy bureaucratic process determined by the government. The perpetrator is caught by police officers—beings representing the hand of the Law of our nation. Then a government-approved process—handled by competent people certified by the government, and educated through systems created and approved by it, overseen by the judiciary and its overseers, who know the letter of the law—begins. No priests communicate with Themis, no lawyers arguing in the name of Zeus. It’s all fair and scientific and overseen by the rule of the land.
The average person commits three felonies a day¹. But that doesn’t matter—you are not a criminal; you are blessed by righteousness. The letter of the law, its intent, is what matters. Intent. Will. Want. Imbued… by the government. Of course, an abstraction. Just people, like you and me. Very adequate individuals, with an education and certification approved by our nation. What? Did the government create itself? Is this some kind of mythology of creation? Of course not… it transformed from a more rudimentary, primitive society, when we used to believe that entities governed what is right and wrong and knew best, when we used to anthropomorphize feelings. We don’t do that anymore: now we anthropomorphize reason. Science. Knowledge. The government. Not deities—but abstractions just as powerful, except these are right. The ones that came before were primitive; they lacked reason. Righteousness and justice only exist within reason… what reason? The one determined by the government.
Well—not exactly. You see, we uphold the government. We can protest. Yes, we can resist the government through a method it itself accepts and wants us to… but well, what about when people criticize the president? Or congressmen, and try to hold them accountable? Yes, the pope is a heretic, you see; it’s not the religion, it’s the pope who is not following God’s orders properly. The president is only wrong because he doesn’t listen to the Constitution. But the Constitution is absolute, a divine letter brought to us by the mythological beings who birthed this nation—Gaia! In fact, when we criticize the government, it is because the government itself is not following its own rules. What a wonderful arrangement: having so much power that your accountability is only to your own standards—the ones you set and shift whenever you feel like it. We have sacraments, priests, rituals—or should I say credentials, journalists, and outrage cycles? What is the difference? The difference is that when we talk about myths, it feels distant, unreal, queasy—a fantasy. Indeed, if only Zeus were a brand, he would’ve been more powerful.
¹ See Three Felonies a Day.