No Way Out

We live in the best of all possible worlds. No argument there, right? I mean, just feast your eyes, not to mention all those other senses, on the immoderate bounty of nature. Would you believe that anyone could ever have found the world otherwise? No? Then have I got news for you ...

My rather unusual skills in reading and research uncovered this story. I must warn you that it is weird, wild, and a mite disturbing. And also, very, very old. But I have decided to share it because it carries a moral lesson and because it has a happy ending.

Once upon a time, there was something called "money." Money was a medium of exchange. I will try to explain. Today, if you are hungry, you find something dead and eat it. If someone else has something you want, you can trade something that you have for the thing that you want. If the other party doesn't want anything that you have, you might have to call in a third party, and the transaction can get complicated. In this long-ago time, they had this money stuff that they used instead. Everyone accepted it and pretended that it was valuable, so they didn't have any complicated three-party transactions. Fortunately for us, our needs and desires these days are pretty simple. Unfortunately for them, their needs and desires were not, and they became obsessed and enslaved by their money stuff. They begged, borrowed, stole, and worshipped it.

So one day, the Chief of Money announced, "We don't have enough money! We need a trillion more of the things, or else! And there's no way out!"

Here, I should explain that "a trillion" is a very big number. I read about something called "imaginary numbers" somewhere, and I think this might have been one of those.

Here, I should also explain that they burned a lot of stuff that put a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and killed and tortured each other a lot and made all kinds of fascinating poisons that they dumped every which where, and some of those poisons were for killing our ancestors, but a lot of the poisons killed them, sometimes on purpose. Anyway, all of this was somehow tied up with the imaginary number of money they needed, but didn't have, and they thought there was no way out. Now, maybe if they gave up some of the burning and killing and poisoning, there would have been a way out, but that was just impossible because, as I said, the money was somehow involved in it.

But there's always a way out, and they took it. That's the happy ending I was talking about. Ok, so maybe it wasn't the best way out for them, but it was a way out, and it did work out great for us. In fact, our ancestors fed for years on the festering remains. There's none of that left now, of course, but we've inherited a lovely planet, and while a lot of species couldn't handle the radiation, hey, it's like water off our chitin.