Flat Earth

Life in two dimensions

Pity the deluded fools who still see the world through 3D glasses. Everyone knows that the earth is flat. Movement can happen only on two axes: the Forward and Backward, and the Left and Right.

We know too that the good lies in only one direction. Progress is marked midway between 10 and 11 o’clock. To go forward one must veer leftward: to go right will take you backwards. Right and backward are effectively synonymous, equally heretical. The heretic must be shamed and shunned, anathema in the face of our solidarity.

Even so, oblivious to our sinister glory, there remain stubborn acolytes of the Right Hand Way, and in their shadows, a yet darker and more dexter cabal. Not content with going the wrong way along the two accepted axes, they whisper in their cloisters of the long-forbidden third: the dimension of the Up and Down.

These haters of all that is diverse and equal maintain that our bipedal stance is something more than evolutionary fluke, that it implies “priority” of the head and heart over, say, the stomach, loins or feet; worse, that those who identify as human are in some obscurantist, mystic mien “above” our animal comrades. Their outmoded mythos contrasts them, favourably of course, even with that most horizontal, most equitable, and wisest of our fellow-beasts, the one whom, if veneration were not so unequal and hence justly proscribed, we would surely venerate: the snake. Admirable of animals, you who cannot move backwards, who look never to the skies but with gaze fixed firm ahead cling fast to level ground! Most material of beasts: would that the errant could know your humility. But they have exchanged the goodly humus for the hubris of hierarchy.

Hard to say which half of this portmanteau is the more scurrilous: sacred or order. For these are the meanings, in the Dark Tongue of the soi-disant philosophers, of hieros and archē. That tongue is of course proscribed, for fear of reactionary propaganda, except to designated officers of the Bureau of Ideology such as myself. But the elucidation of one word should not harm loyal ears, or if it should, may the People’s Commissars have mercy on me. Archē implies that there is an order to reality, set and unchanging, wherein all things are ranked according to proximity or analogy to their supposed origin, another meaning of the same word. From this supposition it is a small step to sanctify that origin and its subsequent order, to pronounce it sacred.

So, hierarchy means sacred order. We know now the results of such superstition: slavery of the individual will to the awe of the unknown, fear of magic, delusions of priestcraft. But we the People are determined never to look up again, to anyone or anything, nor shall we suffer anyone or anything to look down on us. Progress can be made only by sticking to a strictly horizontal plane. Deviation therefrom is distraction, and complicity with the regressive forces that would drag us back.

The heretic has names for those forces which, with the permission of the censors, I will divulge, only to demonstrate their folly. Anthropomorphising the cosmos, they assume that just as the head is physically higher than the bipede’s feet, so the realm of ideas and concepts holds some “metaphysical” precedence over the material universe. They posit that such purely mental constructs as goodness, truth and beauty, which we know to be entirely socially constructed and relative to the will of the People alone, actually exist in some way, beyond the confines of the individual human mind. They claim that these are fixed and immalleable, because they reflect the nature of that highest spiritual reality which they call “God.” This God, they say, cannot change, because he is beyond time and space.

The very fact that anything exists at all, they attribute to this God, claiming that his act of creation reveals the goodness of his nature. From this, they deduce a set meaning to the universe, supposing that all things exist for a purpose: namely, their return to God according to their capacity in the hierarchy. They suppose matter to have an immaterial origin and end, rather than accepting that existence is merely a matter of small chances played out over infinite time according to evolutionary law. They insist that the existence of such a law, calculable by number, demonstrates the logical priority of the abstract over the concrete, and refuse to believe that consciousness could evolve from mindless matter.

If this prioritisation of mind over matter were not already suspiciously anthropocentric, the now largely subdued sect called the Christians go further still. They not only admit their anthropocentricism, but celebrate it. They say that the unfathomable mind beyond and behind the cosmos entered it as a human, taking flesh. This Christ from whom they take their name bears, they say, the perfect “image” of their God, reflecting him like a flawless mirror. This God-man, they say, elevates the human nature above all others, lifting humans into unity with God.

And in this they demonstrate the grave danger of looking up. For they see not only God above them, which would be folly enough, but an entire chain of spiritual beings, invisible to the human eye. They see a third dimension to the world, filled with such beings, angels above them, and demons below. Those demons are supposed to be angels who have fallen from the heights of heaven; and replacing them, they see fellow-humans whom they call “saints,” holy men and women, looking down on us from their constellations around God. “A cloud of witnesses,” they say, still governs their organisation, the Church. A democracy of the dead, their buried feet perpetually drag the benighted thralls back from the march of progress.

Our two-dimensional world is so much simpler and clearer. A world with no invisibles, no fairies, sprites or sorcery, no miracles or interference from above or below; a world where everything can be seen, weighed and measured, if you have the right technology; where everything is comprehensible and controllable, by us alone. A world with no past worth putting faith in, no delusions of hope to look up for, no love to be offered to anyone more than to oneself. A world where humanity counts for no more than anything else and is subject to our own definition, where life is valued as we choose, where killing can be wrong one day and right the next, where Death is just another lifestyle choice, and the State will help you make it (for a small fee). After all, in our 2D vision, there is no difference in the material composition of a corpse and a living body, so why prioritise one over the other?

Dear Comrades: look not up! Stick close to the matter at hand. Keep your eyes on the screen, trust in the technology that has made your lives so much happier and more meaningful, not in things you cannot weigh, like love or dreams. Forget the dove, leave flying to the saints and angels. Be like the snake, down to earth, flat on your belly, forward and left, forward and left, all in time, ever onwards, grinning through your dust-filled maws.