The Pigmy Proles and the Giant Land Lords
THE PIGMY PROLES AND THE GIANT LAND LORDS
In the great rolling planes and wooded moraines, lived the Proles of Indus. They woke up early and went to bed late and filled all their hours with fixing broken things and breaking fixen things. They were small of stature and their lives were short also. They were a very pragmatic people, but in the evenings, for at least a couple of hours, they had loud and infection fun. They played games and told the old stories as best as they could – for they had lost some of their words.
They had a great love for each other, for it is hard to not truly appreciate the people that you work with. And because no one wants to tackle a task with someone unpleasant, they had a very gregarious nature. Even with so much to do, the Proles built each other up while they built things for the Land Lords.
But why would the Proles do so much work for others and never go on vacation or relax at home? Well, the Proles had one major blind spot because they had only two eyes in their heads: They valued the shells of the tiny Polypigma Snail above any other thing.
It was an impractical thing for a practical people. The shells weren’t used for tools because they were too delicate. They didn’t eat the snails and the shells didn’t have any magic beyond the Fibonacci sequence. But they were beautifully colored like a field of flowers that never fades. Additionally, the Proles happened to have more color perceiving cones in their eyes than many other hominids, and in a world of mostly brown and green under grey skies, color is wonder!
The shells were the only thing that the Proles traded in. A token of appreciation for a job well done. A thank you for a neighbor’s assistance. For a good meal or a fine tool. A symbol of love for a budding romance or an enduring friendship. Appreciation wrapped in an endless, bright spiral – a pattern to the infinitesimal.
Before they had developed the snail shell system, they had spent most of their time relaxing and working on stories to tell at night. These stories reinvented the world as they spelled into the air. But that was in ages past, and each generation lost a little more of that magic as their vocabulary dwindled to the needs of the moment – replaced by pretty shells. The most generous among them set the value because no one wants two shells for something they received three shells for the week before. Inflation became a serious problem.
When the Proles hunted all the snails in an area, they simply moved and found more. Eventually they would have run out of shells, and they might have gone back to relaxing and creativity, but their folly was noticed by a tribe of Land Lords.
Unlike the Proles, who lived in an egalitarian matriarchal society like one single family, the Land Lords built walls around themselves. They were aggressive toward each other and worse to strangers. In their meanness, they became exceedingly clever. Tricking each other was their most honored ethos. In coming into contract with the Proles, a rare meeting amongst the heads of the Land Lord houses was convened. A motion was passed and seconded to slaughter the Proles outright and rid them from the land – inferior and smaller as they were – but the cleverest among them had a better trick in mind.
Mostly overlooked, the Land Lords had a healthy population of the snails in the orchards of their jurisdiction. Collecting them was simple enough, but the enterprise went further. Within a few months, the Land Lords had developed a full-scale snail farming operation. They started trading the shells for every form of labor that they had previously had to do themselves and even invented more and more sophisticated specialties of their labor force over time. From household domestic work like cooking and cleaning; construction and maintenance; baking and brewing; broom makers and street sweepers; public works and privy plumbers; snake charmers, fools, and story tellers; barbers and milliners; administrators and rat catchers; a constable and butcher; bobbers and hookers; tailors and classists; a village drunk and doctor; pencil pushers, paper chasers, policy makers, and brown nosers – and all of this was bought and paid for by snail shells. In an especially diabolical twist, even snail farming was turned over to the Proles.
Within a few years, the Land Lords only work was to boss people around. Within five years they replaced all the Proles’ primitive religious beliefs with one true god that gave them mandates from heaven, lines of succession, and generational wealth. Within 20 years they had terraced castles and armies, tapestries of foxhunts, expansive gardens with statuary, lawn parties with croquet, and feasts with foie gras.
With so much good food and leisure time, the Land Lords grew bigger until they were giants. In perfect contrast, the Proles shrunk because they were only allowed stale bread dipped in pond water. After many generations, the tallest among the Proles barely reached the knees of the Land Lords.
But the Land Lords had a blind spot too, and one that grew as their heads hit the clouds: They no longer noticed the things on the ground.
That made them lazy. Though they were still mean, they were no longer clever. They stopped bothering to fill every hour for the industrious Proles with frivolous tasks and busy work. And they let them run everything.
Some of the Proles had too much to think and became impractical. Those that did returned to the ways of magic and started spelling again. They remembered words like happy and sad, why and whatfor. They began asking questions, and that’s a very dangerous thing to do…