It was exciting to share my knowledge of their futures with Gregory and
Anthony (in 28 years they will be, respectively, the
dominant political theorist of the century and a presidential candidate) and
even more exciting to decide that we would band together to change history by influencing the war that is unfolding in Iraq and Syria, a war that we know is a precursor to World War III. As recounted in Chapter 4, after first doubting the wisdom of messing with the past to affect the
future, we agreed that I would not have been privy to my visions unless the mechanism that controls time "wanted" me to be, unless the universe wanted me (us) to act, meaning that the universe itself, or one faction of it, is not happy with the slavish, non-thinking direction of our species.
Late Thursday we sat at the kitchen
table in Gregory's commune, going over the ways we might begin our project.
Exhaustion set in and we agreed to meet again Saturday morning to form a
plan of action.
As you read this post on Saturday I will be in that meeting with Gregory and Anthony- you'll see our decisions in Chapter 6 on Tuesday. Today's chapter recounts my
use of time to prepare myself for today's meeting. This hasn't differed much from my "normal" life, but with partners
and a purpose there seems more point to it.
Friday morning I woke at Gregory's
commune, northwest of Lancaster, where I have permanent guest status.
I had breakfast with my co-conspirators and Gregory drove me back to my
place off Pearblossom in Littlerock. I took my morning nap, always key to
clear thinking, then walked into the kitchen, spread the L.A. Times on the
linoleum table, sipped my coffee, and stared. There was lots of news. Brexit passed. There was a gun control Congressional sit-in and Supreme Court rulings on immigration and
affirmative action. However, there were no stories on the Iraq/Syria war, in which the U.S. and its coalition are battling every day. This was one of those
news days when so many things were happening that the war went away- a
minor story compared to all the breaking news, but in an
honest media the lead headline throughout the world, every day, would
be, "Your Government is Leading You into World War III and there's nothing
you can do about it." (Aside: besides the arguable benefit to humankind such
honesty would bring, if traditional newspapers did this their readership would
soar and they would regain their previous influence).
Nothing jumped out at me from the news that suggested an obvious direction for a first step in changing history. I
spent the afternoon in growing frustration and increasing doubt as to the point
or sanity of our undertaking. I've found in the past that mental logjams like this can be loosened by dips into popular culture, so in the early
evening I rode my bike to the Cinemark at the Antelope Valley Mall and saw Independence Day: Resurgence.
I picked this movie because I recalled not being too annoyed by the original and because Wikipedia described the genre as "science fiction disaster," which, for obvious reasons, resonated.
It was Friday night at the theater, lots
of teenagers- mostly there to see Independence
Day: Resurgence- jostling and rowdy. I picked a seat in the back so I could watch both the film and audience reactions. The point of Independence Day: Resurgence is the destruction conveyed in a
series of CGI segments of vast alien spaceships wiping out familiar world
cities like London and L.A. I say those scenes are the point of the film
because there's no way the teenagers packed into that theater would have been
there for the formulaic love sub-plots or sci-fi concepts. I verified
this by dipping into the young minds in the theater. During the previews
and the movie's non-violent sections the kids were distracted, but during the
movie's CGI images of skyscrapers twisting and rush-hour traffic hurtling into the air the audience became silent, almost reverent, completely
focused on the screen. I inspected the teenage neurology during the
destructive scenes and found that a strong peace of mind prevailed. The
adults in the room showed the same. I checked myself and, yes, the laying
waste of gigantic swaths of human civilization was utterly soothing. No
wonder the industry spends so much money churning out end-of-the-world movies, and no wonder governments have so little difficulty maneuvering
their populations into war: everyone is itching for disaster. You will
not find this aspect of war in a typical history book. Only fiction, like what you're
reading now, tells the truth. Thus, while Aldous Huxley's novel Point Counterpoint describes how the years
leading up to World War I featured emotional turmoil and craving for havoc
in the English middle-class, high school history books only tell you about an ageing empire and an assassinated archduke. Someday
textbooks will say that World War III, the one we're itching for now, started over
oil, water, religion, food- but if we somehow become wise we'll write
that World War III started because people everywhere were unhinged by
peace itself. Humankind's most pressing challenge is to make peacetime more
enjoyable.
How can Gregory, Anthony and I interest
anyone in avoiding war, given our species' taste for periodic destruction?
If we pontificate we'll sound like bleeding hearts or impractical losers.
I think our only hope is to find some piece of evidence proving that we
are being manipulated into the war. People want their mayhem, but they
don't like feeling tricked. My friend Doug has found significant circumstantial
evidence that we are indeed being tricked (http://laskenlog.blogspot.com/), but circumstantial evidence is not enough to
change history. We need a "smoking gun." Read Chapter 6 on Tuesday,
June 28 to see what we come up with.
I've been waking up in a cold sweat
every night wondering what to do with my information from the future. I want to use it to forestall the insidious war now encircling us, but changing history looks tricky. Theorists have wondered what would happen if a time traveler went
back to kill baby Hitler. Would neo-Nazis master time-travel and go back
to protect Hitler, leading to an escalating time-war that would never end? Or
would some sort of cosmic control mechanism kick-in to preempt the disruptions?
I tend towards the cosmic control mechanism, yet the pressure on me to act, to
use the information, has been getting stronger. I keep wondering why the
control mechanism permitted me to get my glimpse of the future, even though I'm
well positioned to use it to affect history. What's the point of allowing me to have this knowledge if I can't do something with it?
I sought out and met both Gregory and Anthony Roberts, the real ones, but I did not
share my knowledge about their futures. I told them about this book- that I was using them as inspiration for my fiction, but I did not tell them that I use "fiction" in Jane Austin's sense of "non-fiction," so they have not known that one of them, Gregory, in our time a west coast guru
with a small but growing following, will become the dominant political thinker
of this century, while Anthony Roberts,
today a teenager living on Gregory's commune, does not know he will run for president in 2044 on
a platform derived from Gregory's thinking (see Prologue).
Until this morning, that is, when I told them. Yes, I told them their
futures. I figured, what's the worst that could happen? We're
already being waltzed into World War III and we're powerless to react, though we see it in plain sight. Maybe the cosmic time-control mechanism
is leaking information to help us stop or modify the war.
At first Gregory and Anthony Roberts were skeptical of my story, but after I demonstrated my telepathic abilities they accepted its truth and were stunned to learn about their
prominent futures. They asked many questions about what's coming- the war, the dictatorships, the post-war rebirth of democracy- but
there wasn't much I could tell them beyond what I've written so far.
"What do you think we should do?" Gregory asked.
"I'm not sure," I said.
"Maybe we should wait a while and see if there are rules about changing
history," Anthony Roberts advised.
"Yes, I worry about the cosmic consequences too," I said, " but why
was I permitted to receive this information? I can't help thinking that
the cosmos, or some part of it, wants me, wants us to use knowledge of the
future to change history. What else could it mean?"
We sat in silence that gradually settled into agreement, and a conspiracy was
born.
If the lights of the universe blink out tonight, I guess you can
blame me, but so far nothing has happened, or maybe it's happened and we can't
tell. This I do know, I will have important new information to share in Chapter 5 this Saturday!
You might envy me for my telepathic
abilities, especially now that I've found I can read future minds, but this is
not an easy spot to occupy. Imagine, wherever I go, whether it's the
Family Dollar Store on Pearblossom Highway with its sparse staff
and desert dwelling customers or the crowded sidewalks of Melrose Avenue in
L.A., I see people living their everyday lives as if a tsunami of change is not
towering over their heads. Uncomfortable as this makes me feel, it has to be that way, I guess. Just as management does not want inmates in
the psych ward to be agitated, so society's handlers prefer the relative peace
of quotidian worry to panic and hysteria. But my fate is to see World War
III taking shape right now. We're well into the preliminary stages; in fact
we're walking calmly up the chute to slaughter as I write. I could easily
become one of those guys on a corner with a sign proclaiming "The End is near!,"
but my wife would leave me. Wait, she's already left. A couple
of them have.
I'm doing full disclosure because
my topic today is the evolutionary struggle between men and women. Is it
coincidence that the numerous attempts, since the Industrial Revolution, to revive matriarchy, at least on a power-sharing basis, are culminating now,
just as the last possible exits from World War III close around us, in the symbolic man
vs. woman matchup of Trump vs. Clinton?
It
isn't easy to distract people from an apocalypse; you need the strongest
distractors. The ultimate showdown between man (brutish, impatient,
celebrating emotion over intellect) and woman (patient, emphasizing logic and
strategy) is almost distracting enough so that we don't notice that neither
candidate seriously addresses the conflicts flaring up around us.
The candidates do promise
"defense" against our enemies, but they offer no recognition that
U.S. policies created these enemies and in many cases nurtured and supported
them. They offer no recognition that our overly large and neglected
population needs enemies and war just to establish a coherent, defined society.
Certainly neither candidate deals with
the fundamental concern that, just as the 10,000 years of human
"civilization" before us showed no progress in figuring
out alternatives to war, so our species has failed again, in our time, to figure out
an alternative. This is big news, perhaps the biggest piece of unreported
news today, along with the genetic engineering and AI robots that are lining up
to come to our rescue (i.e. replace us after we kill ourselves).
From this point of view, the current
presidential race is not a struggle between man and woman- it's a sideshow to
distract us. Whether the brutish man or the diplomatic woman wins, either way we
will be manipulated into war.
What about men and women?
After the war, my glimpses indicate, people will be concerned with the
endless variety of genders possible through genetic engineering. With
mastery of human/parasite relations (see Prologue), we may be freed from sexual reproduction,
possibly freed from sexual desire, a confusing prospect indeed. Why must
my mind be filled with such profound conundrums, only a few decades removed
from relevance, while my vote can go only to one of two people arguing simplistic and badly defined issues?
To recap: I am your contemporary,
occupying the same time as you, this June, 2016. For most of my career I
was a performing telepath known as Harry the Human, but the big
news is that last week I discovered I can read minds from the future.
I copied the campaign speeches of the two presidential candidates from
2044 and used them as the Prologue to this novel, A Peek at Infinity.
In Chapter 1, as you'll see, I track down the younger version of one of the candidates and find
that in our time he is 19 years old, living in the desert with a charismatic
guru known simply as Gregory; Gregory's story became Chapter 1.
Chapter 2 is titled "Where am
I?" because the protagonist, me, asks where he is. He's discovered
that he lives under the duplicitous regime of a corporate/state hybrid- that
much he knows. But what is he?, is maybe how he should
phrase his question. Is he a squeaky wheel when no one else cares?
What is his motivation? Does he go for the controversial, "hot
button" stuff just because it's available turf? Just so he can get
noticed?
Hey it would be nice
to get noticed once in a while! And I am willing to sing for my supper.
Tonight's song concerns the controversy stoked by Donald Trump in the wake of the Orlando
killings about whether President Obama should be acting tougher against
Islamic terrorists- by defining them as such- and Obama was also called
out this week by 50 state department diplomats who say he should be acting
tougher against Syria's Assad regime.
Trump and the diplomats gave Obama his cues for a clever game, in which the President acts like he's one character in one script even though he is two characters acting in two simultaneous, antithetical scripts. In one script, Obama acts the part of a timid
president whose advisors and fellow citizens are furious at him for his lack of
military action. In the other script the President has been bombing
Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan non-stop since he's been president, and making a
public show of our coalition with Russia and Saudi Arabia against ISIS at the
same time that those countries reveal their colors by bombing civilians at will.
As with the taping of a live-audience TV show when you're told
by flashing signs when to applaud and encouraged by cameramen when to laugh,
Americans wait for their script, and when the signs come onstage, we deliver the expected on-demand bandwagon effect, as we protest: "Why won't President Obama wage war? The People demand that he wage war!"
The fact is that when you, the hapless
viewer, shake your head at the non-warlike Obama, that response was created in you by your TV set,
just as surely as fifty years ago a TV set created your desire for
Betty Crocker's Chocolate Brownies.
Mary Queen of Scots reportedly said (while awaiting her execution), "In my end is my beginning." I appropriate the quote to reference my linking Chapter 1 of my novel, "A Peek at Infinity," (i.e. this chapter) to its beginning (or end, depending how you look at it). Its contents comprises the dialogue from the future, titled "Gregory's Army of the Young," referenced numerous times in the preceding (i.e. following) chapters, which includes introductory statements from Harry the Human and Gregory, and the campaign statements of Anthony and Rebecca when they run against each other in the presidential election of 2044. This account is also posted near the top of this blog, thus conflating "beginning" with "end," which makes sense if you conceive of time as a circular illusion (not so much if you don't).
I first met Gregory, the twenty-four year old leader of the revolutionary group Mantis- known more popularly as Gregory's Army of the Young- and the author of the widely read essay,
Introduction to Revolution (posted below), in the Bakersfield Woolworths, a week before the coronavirus stay-at-home order hit California. We sat at an old-fashioned soda counter and talked for a long time.
Gregory is a visionary with many devoted
followers. He brings word of an approaching non-human future guided by Artificial Intelligence and biotech, disguised as helpers so they won't appear to be engineering our replacement.
Gregory's followers have been growing their numbers
through subtle Internet use and word-of-mouth. I wish there had been a Mantis when I came of age in the 1960’s, but that was an era of post-war stalemate. All we could do was compose interesting art and
music. There was no revolution to be had. That stalemate
is over. Mantis is the group to join if you want your descendants to have a human life.
I urged Gregory to let me publish his story. He tends to be secretive, but he gave me permission to repost Introduction to Revolution, along with the future nomination acceptance speeches of Gregory’s proteges (and former allies) Anthony Roberts of the Scientific Humanist party, and Rebecca Silversmith of the Cosmic Merger Party, for the presidential election of 2044. With help from the Time Artists (continue reading more on them) this is the only time I, along with a companion (Gregory observed his future self as well) have been able to use my telepathic abilities to see the future. The Time Artists were reluctant, but Gregory and I felt that events in the “real” world had reached a point where something new was needed.
All the best, Harry the Human
Introduction to revolution
By Gregory
Greetings fellow humans! My name
is Gregory and I am the leader of Mantis, a revolutionary movement on the West Coast whose aim is to ensure that the coming pre-emption of human evolution by AI and biotech companies will not exclude the co-evolution of
human groups who wish to determine their own culture.
Why might some people want to determine their own culture? Simply, some people may not want their progeny to end up as machine parts in a factory, or as medicated zombies waiting to blink out of a new world.
Some people might want to create a
world for themselves, not for a corporation.
My friend and colleague before the war, nom de guerre, "Harry
the Human,” fancied himself a revolutionary in the 1960's, but he tells me that no revolution was happening then, at least at a basic level, so there wasn't much for a revolutionary to do. Now, he and I agree, revolution is well underway.
What do we mean by "revolution"? First, here's what we do not mean: We do not mean a violent overthrow of governments or corporations. We do mean a consistent refusal to submit to government/corporate plans if they stand in the way of our new, human lives.
When test-tube babies grow into optimal factory workers, we want nothing to do with it. When governments clone AI-guided soldiers for wars of corporate conquest and domestic
manipulation, we want nothing to do with it. When education becomes a tech manual, we want nothing to do with it.
We want what many people have wanted: A
rational life that fits into the planet that engendered us. We are
not opposed to AI or genetic engineering, or the rest of science with its powerful gifts for our
kind, but we want a say in our re-creation. For instance, we want beauty in our society. Our species has beauty receptors, but we destroy all beauty as
if it threatens us. When the industrial world is ugly as perceived by traditional human receptors, people are guided to de-evolve their beauty receptors and replace them with AI-managed receptors designed for new, pale definitions of beauty, or they are supplied with "antidepressants" to dull the pain of an ugly world. We will do no such things! We will develop our beauty receptors, our poetry
receptors, our thinking receptors, our love receptors!
We in Mantis believe that the re-configuring of all or most nation-states will occur a few years after the wars now unfolding have reached their climax, the
purpose of those wars being to distract populations from the inability of nation-states to integrate the new technologies into human culture with any semblance of "democracy." That
inability will be too evident to hide in the aftermath of the wars now being started for us.
Mantis will resist subjugation by securing its own territory, politically and legally. We will interact and have
peaceful relations with corporations and governments, but we will not be subject to them. We will be subject to our own laws.
Where will our territory be? Since Mantis is spread up and down the U.S. West Coast, it will likely be in some part of the current western U.S. It is too early to know the location, because the re-configuration of the U.S., along with the redrawing of the borders of all the world's nation-states, will be a post-war process. When it arrives for the U.S., Mantis will be strong and ready to negotiate our new place.
Through the following speeches from the 2044 US presidential election you will meet my young proteges, Anthony Roberts and Rebecca Silversmith, who will run against each other in that election. Much can be learned from reading these speeches (because of complications arising from meddling in the future, I cannot endorse or comment on either Anthony or Rebecca's future platforms).
The Media/Government/Military Complex does not want people to be aware of their evolution.
But we of Mantis are aware.
With hope, Gregory
Candidate speeches from the 2044 U.S. presidential election
Statement from Anthony Roberts, candidate for the Scientific Humanist Party
Greetings Americans and all people of Earth! We approach this election at a critical time, as the forces guiding our species converge to offer us a moment of decision. By using the term "decision" I have already distinguished our party from the opposition, Cosmic Merger, which sees the next step in human evolution continuing the passive, uncaring process we have known since we began what we thought was the domination of this planet. In truth, we have never dominated anything; we were thrust into the appearance of dominance by who-knows-what forces, making a virtue of necessity with the old scriptural command for "dominion." As the catastrophe of the Third World War made clear, we have had no more dominion over our planet and our lives than fruit flies. The science of consciousness has shown that we haven't even possessed our own selves, as we find that the fictional self in our heads that details the "decisions" we make and our moment-to-moment being occur a full quarter-second after the fact. We have been automatons, slaves if you will, to forces that our "science" could not, indeed did not want to see.
That has changed with that very science of consciousness, as foreseen in the pre-war "movie," The Matrix, recently restored and understood as prophetic. This work suggests that when we realize we are shadows on Plato's wall, a brave achievement in itself, we change. This change has occurred to our entire species, and we face a clear decision, yes, a decision! Do we want to participate in our own reconstruction, or do we not?
Scientific Humanism started, as our opposition Cosmic Merger did, from the teachings of our beloved Gregory, teachings which he developed as World War III was developing. Gregory helped us understand and deal with a disaster taken by many as the final repudiation of the pride our species once had in itself, in its rationality and resourcefulness, happening ironically just as we seemed to acquire, at least technologically, the long-sought dominion of the earth. The war was- as Gregory warned- a product of covert technocrats who corralled eight billion confused and frightened people into believing that whichever "nation-state" they belonged to (non-belonging being a dangerous rarity), or whatever cultural or ethnic tribe, other nation-states, tribes and factions were moving against theirs, so that the ancient valorizing of combat was revived and people were manipulated into global war. While each side believed other sides had started the fighting, in fact the technocrats of the species had worked together to start it.
Every schoolchild knows that World War III, using AI-assisted nuclear, biological, geological and meteorological weapons killed two-thirds of the human population, a slaughter we now recognize as the intent of the war from the beginning, killing roughly the segment of the population that was about to be rendered unemployed by AI. The instigators eventually turned on each other, revealing themselves in the process, and a great purging ensued. Many of their oligarchical ideas were exposed by documents uncovered in the year leading up to the Treaty of Los Angeles in 2027. The universal acceptance of the Treaty led to a resurgence of old-style domestic politics, most of which, my opponent and I agree, was noise. The most prominent of the nascent political parties, led by Gregory, was Purposeful Beginning, which had a compelling vision of humanity's preferred course: that we should take control of the newly powerful biological and AI technologies to remake our species from another blueprint than that envisioned by the instigators of the war- a blueprint that would represent what the species as a whole desired for itself. The World War had effectively sated the part of the human psyche that craved fire and death, so this would be a rare opportunity for a species to set its own agenda. Young people flocked to our message and we became the dominant party.
There was loose unity for several years, until two opposing factions emerged with differing visions of the coming prototype for human biology and culture, and Gregory has judiciously stepped aside to let the process unfold. Those who drifted from PB's founding principles of self-determination, later becoming, as noted, Cosmic Merger, were comfortable with the traditional hierarchical society of the industrial world- the management/worker dichotomy- and justified it with a veneer of mystical babble to cover the lack of actual change in human nature. CM envisioned compliant workers and consumers living modest and intellectually restricted lives in service of a small class of highly comfortable "managers," these being, of course, the party elite. The problem discerned by the founders of Scientific Humanism was that, without fundamental change in our psyches, the managerial class would be as much in the thrall of the workers as the workers were of them. The basic thralldom of our species would be unchanged. We would still, without further understanding and modification of our "specs," be laboring to fulfill imperatives not written or understood by us.
Take sexual pleasure for example. We have learned that sexual reproduction is a response to the rapid evolution of parasites, who are so aggressive against multicellular creatures like humans that we must continually reshuffle our genes merely to survive. Our science, however, is reaching a point where the parasites can be confronted, perhaps co-opted by us, so that rather than wiping them out- which would probably wipe out many ecosystems we depend on- we might incorporate them into our biology. This is the way to true dominion of our earthly environment, not the mindless kill-offs we pursued in the past.
And what of sex, then? In another prophetic pre-war work, Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, the workers had no need of sex, being mass-produced in petri dishes, yet the managerial class enjoyed culturally approved promiscuity. Along with the recently recognized impracticality of cloned humans- in terms of matching parasite evolution- it is now clear that the sexual pleasure of the managers depicted in the book had no biological function, since the managers too were lab-born. What we need now is a conscious decision about what sex is and what it could be in the post-parasite world. Do we need two genders? Should there be relentless recharging of desire, expelled periodically in orgasmic release, or should we experience a sort of steady-state orgasm? At last, we can decide!
In addition to an incomplete understanding of sex, Brave New World did not fully explore the age of automation, which is reaching its climax now through AI. We will soon have no need of a worker class. There will literally be no work. Some will try to take refuge in the managerial class, but what will they manage? At that moment we will have an existential crisis like none before. Will we become so bored by our purposeless state that we start fearing/loving our robots and have a war with them just for something to do? An alternative would be to grow up, become rational and self-aware, and be on this planet for the first time. The Scientific Humanist Party chooses the latter.
I humbly accept my party’s nomination as its presidential candidate. A vote for me on November 2 will be a vote for decision. A vote for Cosmic Merger will be a vote for the passivity that time and again has nearly destroyed our species.
The choice is yours!
In Solidarity, Anthony
Statement from Rebecca Silversmith, candidate for the Cosmic Merger Party
Greetings, fellow humans! This election offers the starkest choice that our species has faced in many years. Do we choose the arrogant and selfish path that has dimly lit the way throughout our desperate and tragic history, as my opponent from the Scientific Humanist Party has? Or do we at last follow Gregory's true path and combine with the forces that brought us into being in the first place?
The recent war offers all the proof we need that the old ways of humanity did not serve us well. We dub it World War III, as if only three big wars characterize the species, when in fact we should call it Human War Three-Hundred Thousand, suggesting the non-stop wars we've engaged in throughout our recorded history. The Scientific Humanists point out, correctly, that World War III was a manipulated effort by mostly hidden technocrats to scrap an infrastructure of obsolete technology and discontented humans, replacing it with obedient AI driven humanoids. They suggest that the passivity of humans made the war possible. The Cosmic Merger Party understands, however, that the arrogance of the technocrats who promoted World War III is exactly what the Scientific Humanists now extol. Those technocrats embodied the very traits that my opponent would like to see enshrined in the species, glorified in a credo of "rational decision making." How many times has humankind paid obeisance to decisiveness as a trait divorced from what it decides? How has that worked? Look no further than Nazi Germany, whose leader's favorite philosophical concept was "will.”
Take sex for example. My opponent is correct that a potential modus vivendi between humans and parasites may open up sexual reproduction and its cultural artifacts to reinterpretation. But he insists that we are in a position to decide in detail how that should be expressed. Do we actually know enough to be in the position of decision we're in, regarding sexuality or the many other evolving aspects of human culture and physiology? What the Cosmic Merger Party understands is that our current position of apparent "dominion" remains a result of forces we cannot see. Why are we in this apparent dominant position? We don't know why, any more than we've known why we've been in any position throughout human history.
Should we depend on AI to figure out our coming role, before we've done it ourselves? Where is the wisdom that people used to speak of? The term "wisdom" is not used by my opponent, because he knows that his understanding does not go beyond the mechanistic understanding of past industrial eras. Wisdom is the term for knowledge that cannot be known. My opponent would scoff at such a formulation, but if he meditated, if he opened his mind to the non-human universe, he might have a better idea what we should do.
And what of science? Does the Cosmic Merger Party oppose science and its gifts? Not at all. What we call for is a new type of science, so that, for instance, instead of finding out what atoms are made of by smashing them into each other, or determining how animals operate by torturing them to death, we find new tools to "see" into things. There is evidence that the ancient cultures of our species did indeed see into things, and speak with things. We've been taught to ridicule and dismiss such notions, in favor of my opponent's credo of "deciding," of keeping the human in charge. And look what that got us: Human War Three-Hundred Thousand.
The next leader of our nation will represent one of two competing philosophies. Will you elect my opponent and plunge us into a high-tech dark age? Or will you elect me and usher in the age when our species meets its true parents, the earth and the sky, the inner and the outer, and we merge as one?
This is what I seek, as I proudly accept the Cosmic Union Party's nomination as the standard bearer for Gregory's vision.
Listen to your brain, follow your heart, and on November 2nd vote for me!
Thank you, Rebecca
[For more on Gregory and his movement, continue reading Harry the Human.]
