The final solution
We tried everything
And if we hadn’t, all this would seem horrible indeed.
But how else do you correct the social ills unless you take radical steps?
I know you’ve heard the old cliché about breaking eggs for an omelet.
In this case, it is about the problem of how to make people responsible for their own actions.
After careful consideration, I’m not sure they can ever be.
When I started I thought as you did that people were simply skirting their social duties and we here at the institute started a campaign to show people by example how to make things work.
We set up an ideal community in which the citizens participated in every facet of government and civil life. We elected people who were positively motivated and socially stable.
I know this does not reflect the reality of the urban and other deprived regions. But we had to start somewhere and make a model, which could serve as a goal for others.
It just didn’t work out the way we intended.
Sure we had excellent results in the beginning. Then a slow deterioration stet in over time. It seems we couldn’t keep up people’s enthusiasm and still maintain contact with the outside world.
We concluded that people were being infected by bad attitudes and lazy habits they saw in the everyday world.
In other words, the result was exactly opposite of that which we sought.
Instead of serving as a model for the real world, the real world was shaping our people. The more contact we had the worse it became till the only solution we had was to close up the experiment entirely and keep its members isolated.
This, too, worked for a while – longer than the partial contact experiment anyway. Maybe with the lack of influence the inner selves began their own development, and two distinct groupings of people formed: those who did the influencing and those affected by it. Before long, our perfect society was corrupt again.
We were stunned. Closer examination made clear that there were hard-core personality types at work, a certain kind of being, which would emerge and destroy whatever social order we established.
In another time and social context, such as in the religious era, we would have call this a Satan element.
This negative force infected others in the study group to such an extent that some of us called them sheep.
Often the effect of this bad element was so devastating that we had to eliminate people from the program altogether. We saw sheep after sheep ruined as a result, and it was evident that unless we countered this bad element in our study group, there would be no hope for social order in the wider society.
We tried everything from subtle persuasions to brute force.
We started analyzing the Satan people, breaking them into subgroups of social deviance.
We had some minor success, though in treating these individuals we often saw a significant loss in their personality. Those we converted became submissive and obedient but lacked any sense of originality.
Those that resisted us often suffered mental breakdowns or went utterly crazy.
We even encountered an element stubborn enough to resist even our most aggressive efforts.
For this last group, we needed to find a final solution.
Yet we soon learned that even the most stubborn group could yet be subdivided into two distinct groups.
In one group we had people whose resistance was largely personal – an individual potency who affected the sheep largely as an example, serving as negative role modes.
We found we could apply a less drastic solution to them such as simply removing them from society either through the penal system or mental institutions.
Once thus confined, their influence on the sheep immediately dissipated.
The second of this group, however, poses the most significant problem. This group actually seeks to change others, “to wake up the sheep” as they put it. This group actually believes their cause is just and cannot be convinced otherwise.
Drug treatments, threats, imprisonments have no effect on these and even within containment, they organize and resist.
For this group, there is only one answer, and I suggest we isolate this kind and do what must be done as soon as possible since it is clear that within our experiment and in the general society, their influence is growing…