continued…

The few dissenting philosophy professors took the side of Bericoles and thereafter followed the battle of ideas and published papers that I mentioned earlier. With the weight of Professor Lasdyknasd’s (faulty) findings, the Quakelo’s defeated the Bericoles’ hands down according to every public opinion poll taken on the matter.

All of our agricultural and synthetic food production have for several decades been an automated procedure. People are only required to ‘run the machinery’. When the machinery was finally designed, built and fully in place the government started to regulate it in order to minimize waste and insure that every person would be fed properly. This was regarded as an infringement of freedom by a few small groups of food producers.

As soon as the professor’s paper was accepted by the philosopher’s, philosophy academians, intellectuals and influential thinkers, they in turn pointed out that the next logical step would be to assume that the rest of Quakelo’s Theories should be put into practice. After all, they conjectured, The Theory of Ultimate Objects is the foundation for the rest of the ideas in his body of works, therefore if the foundation is true the rest of it must also be true. According to the political section of Quakelo’s works the government should run all industry and means of production. The government promptly assumed control of all remaining private food production lands, machines and facilities. Any opposition was effectively silenced. Who were food producers to argue with scientists, philosophers and political leaders?

Production of food was turned over to governmental scientists who were very eager to try their newly discovered theories and ideas in this area. The computers that instructed the food production machinery were reprogrammed according to a quasi-statistical model of The Theory of Ultimate Objects. The following harvest was the first indication that the public, at large, had that things were not working out according to plan.

Some places grew an inedible cross mating of two or more different plants. Others grew larger than normal mutated plants that, while pleasing to the eye, were poisonous. Still others grew plants that died before ready for harvesting.

Many places had simply grown no food at all. The synthetic food production fared no better.
A great deal of finger pointing and blame assigning occurred. Emergency conferences were held. The scientists were greatly encouraged by the wealth of strange (though inedible) new information they had to manipulate. The politicians were engaged in many lengthy debates over which group of scientists with which variation on The Theory might be more valid. The philosophers blamed the scientists and the politicians for not properly practicing The Theory which was True and, therefore, could not be doubted.

There are rumors that some small groups of people in extreme rural, isolated areas are growing their own food. Rumors have alternately confirmed and denied this information. No one has publicly come forward with any evidence to support these claims.

The old physicist Fenstan came out of retired silence to make an appeal to his fellow scientists everywhere. He called for an end to this ridiculous flirtation with disaster. He said what was needed was a return to ‘reason and objective reality’. Several intellectuals responded by pointing out that Fenstan himself a few decades ago was proposing that the world be run by one large government with wide ranging powers. Not to mention that he had obtained his current venerated position with his work on Relativity, in which it was proved that everything was relative to everything else and therefore, nothing could be absolute and objective.

Fenstan then issued an uncharacteristically harsh statement to the effect that these intellectuals were twisting the meaning of his work and applying it’s ideas to other areas completely out of context. By this time, of course, old Fenstan was being laughed off of the scene as an ‘obviously’ senile old man that had not kept up with ‘modern ideas and ways of thinking’. Anyone on Fenstan’s side of the argument was silenced when one of his old colleagues was quoted in a widely circulated government report.

In this report, the physicist Iandlepough came out of retirement briefly to remind people that his own Uncertainty Principle proved conclusively that the fundamental nature of reality was ultimately unknowable. Therefore, the people should have patience with the new and wonderful work the governmental scientists had done in the food production field. Just because the previous food producers were lucky enough to be able to manage consistently growing food, he said, did not prove that we were worse off now.