“You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us” – John Lennon
Imagine for the sake of argument that there is another universe where everything operates in the exact opposite fashion than ours, a world where the need for loving things and wanting to own and control own human beings is replaced by its precise antithesis: A crazy yet simple notion that it's people who are for the loving and things for owning.
A parallel universe where it makes no sense whatsoever to spend your life working jobs that you hate to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don't even like. As a wise man once said: It's not the one who dies with the most toys that wins.
Because in the end, nobody will stand at your funeral to render homage to your avant-garde futon, your 12-functions toothbrush, and remembers you by owning the 'right' number of shoes.
A parallel universe where their stone tablet has only one single commandment on it. This one:
"Do what thy love, and ye shall provide the best value to your peers".
A world where everything is so backwards that young men and women can never be jailed for refusing to fight in wars, only for starting them.
A universe so strange that you don't have to glorify people who commit massacres, you don't award medals to genocidal maniacs, instead they answer to the crimes they've committed, so such a thing can never happen again thus saving the next generations from such a deadly loop.
A world so crazy that not even whistle-blowers are sent to jail, but only the criminals that they expose. How sick is that?
A world where no one has to look at dirt and pretend that they see some invisible force field called 'borders' that makes them special by being born inside it and not on the other side of it.
A world where those limits don’t keep expanding and retracting and your “specialness” morphing with it, depending on the wise parameters of invading foreign lands.
A world where no one has to stare at pieces of cloth hanging on a on a pole and pretend that it has the magical power to make them special by a simple accident of birth.
In fact in such a retro-flex universe, the only place where you could get a kick staring at poles is in strip clubs.
“I could never understand ethnic or national pride. Because to me pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth. Being Irish isn’t a skill, it’s a fuckin’ genetic accident.
You wouldn’t say ‘I’m proud to be 5’11”. I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer.’ So why the fuck would you be proud to be Irish, or proud to be Italian, or American or anything?” – George Carlin
And more importantly, little kids in Kindergarten are not forced to keep repeating mind-numbing incantations for twelve years straight until they finally start to believe it.
Imagine such a parallel universe where hospitals for the criminally insane are packed with those who instigate atrocities dividing people by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation...Etc. As opposed to...
Well, having them run the goddamn asylum.
In fact, the very sentence "when the insane run the asylum" wouldn’t make the slightest sense in the world, because there would be no one preaching demented collectivist notions, so their traditions would never include scarifying your first born, nor eating a man’s heart, walking a virgin to the volcano, not even showering little kids with napalm as a prelude a newer and more sophisticated form of human sacrifice.
None of these things would be considered normal, let alone tradition. I mean, these guys had it wrong from the beginning.
A world so unusually weird that children aren’t even taught religion and flag worship in school, not until they reach the age of reason anyway. There would be no pushing dangerous ideologies into their unformed heads before their cognitive senses are developed.
There would be no making them repeat submissive mantras, no sliding of dubious dogmas while they still believe in the tooth fairy and Papa Noël.
None of that indoctrination behavior would take place. At least not starting at first grade anyways.
A world so backwards that even sending people to prison for victim-less crimes or carrying bits of vegetation on their person would seem evil and cruel, a world where imprisonment and rape would be considered barbaric rather that rehabilitating and therapeutic.
A world where you are less likely to be killed by police than dying in an actual war zone because police officers are held accountable for their actions, not glorified on TV for following orders from the prison complex to bring them more clientele, and by the way television would not be the most influential member of the family either.
Such a backward universe sounds insane doesn’t it?
If you find it though, save me a spot, I’ll probably would like to take a look. But meanwhile, here’s a matrix moment, what if the universe that’s backwards is this one?
"Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." – Mark Twain
P.S: Please remember, this is just some light humor with a splash of philosophy, so I am not trying to contradict anyone’s beliefs. Hope you all enjoy it, and I wish you all a happy weekend!