Deleted draft of Epilogue from "A New Faith"

Mr. M held the exquisite handmade crystal glass up in the air and let the amber liquid in it roll around slowly. The setting sun’s rays refracted through the numerous planes and cuts in the glass and deepened the shade of the amber liquid to a reddish hue. 

He was looking forward to tasting this single malt. It was more than 100 years old and had been transported a long distance solely for his pleasure - from one end of the world to another. It was made on an island, way up north in the Shetlands, by an exclusive distillery that few people even knew existed. He was about to sip it on this private island near the southern tip of New Zealand. 

He took another whiff of the single malt and then gazed meditatively across the wide expanse of the estate which ended in a sheer cliff. If he squinted, he could see the shimmering line of golden ice and snow of the Antarctic in the distance. As the sun was starting to set for that year on Sequoia, it had begun to rise in the southern hemisphere.

“You know, it doesn’t need to breathe so much Mr. M. You should have tasted it already,” Mr. B was trudging across the massive deck, leaning on his ornate cane. He was carrying his own glass of 60-year old red wine from an exclusive vineyard in northern Italy. 

“Aah, Mr. B! Good to see you walking again. It appears that this weather suits you well. The color is back in your cheeks. Almost rosy, wouldn’t you say?”

Strangely, both men were similarly short and roughly the same weight. Mr. M stood erect while Mr. B was slightly bent over. One could have almost mistaken them for father and son. However, they were not related by blood. Only by purpose. 

“Yes, I do like it here. Especially, this time of the year,” Mr. B smiled genially. 

Mr. M walked over to Mr. B to shake his hand and then they both walked back inside to the magnificent board room that shimmered the same way Mr. M’s crystal glass had done a few minutes ago. 

Everything in the boardroom was extremely expensive. Not nice, not tasteful - just extremely expensive. It was all made exclusively by hand for this boardroom and would never be replicated. That last part was in the contract. Thankfully, the people who made it were still alive and had all their limbs intact unlike the artisans who had created the Taj Mahal.

Yet nothing was worth more than the men who sat around the large table. Yes, they were all men. Women had not yet managed to break through this ultimate glass ceiling. For the simple reason that most people - including all women - were not even aware such a ceiling existed in the first place. This was no glass ceiling where the people below it could see what was above it. This ceiling was such that it left the illusion for those below it that they had already reached the top. 

Together, these men represented a personal net worth close to five trillion US dollars. They controlled companies that, together, had a market capitalization ten times that. If they had formed a country of their own - and they did own vast amounts of land and employed millions of people - they would, unquestionably, be the largest economy in the world. Ever!

Not that the quaint notions of nationhood were relevant for these men. Nor those of net worth or the market capitalization of their companies. What all these men had in common was their interest in maintaining a specific version of societal structure. And their version was that of an extremely hierarchical society where a few controlled the many. Just like in the old days when the kings, priests, and magnates sat at the top and everyone else bowed to them. This was not about politics or religion or money or any other ideology. It was about power. The concentration of power within the hands of a few was necessary to sustain the particular form of civilization that these men believed to be the nature of humanity. Politics, money, religion - or for that matter any tribal identity such as race, color, caste, nationality, etc. - were mere tools to be deployed to achieve and hold power. Nothing more, nothing less. 

The brief divergence from this true nature of humanity during the second half of the last century had been decisively corrected by these men. The establishment of this hierarchical society was unnoticed by the masses because it had been achieved by subverting the democratic system itself. The result of this approach was that the durability of this society had been enhanced even more than in the past when popular revolutions had deposed the kings, priests, and magnates. Since the simulacrum of democracy existed, the masses had no idea that they had lost control over their lives. 

These men had decided to collude and hence, even the thought of armed conflicts among major nations had been more or less eliminated. Of course, armed conflicts at a very local level were encouraged to sustain the necessary nationalist fervor in order to keep the masses on the edge of uncertainty. At times, other tribal instincts were unleashed to achieve the same purpose. The use of the liberal democratic instruments such as elections and free media meant that there was no need to spend inordinate amounts on the visible and very resource intensive approach of using armed troops to keep the masses under control. 

There were, of course, a tiny minority of intellectuals and activists who did figure out what was happening and did shout from the rooftops to warn others. But alas, human evolution is what they were fighting against. The speed of human evolution was just too slow to counter the technological evolution with which the men in this room had achieved more or less complete control. The few who continued to rant and rave against these men could be easily smothered in a vast sea of conspiracy theorists which mostly grew organically but at times had to be gently nudged and a few times actively supported by the men in this room. Drowning out the sane voices in the noise was the easiest thing to do instead of trying to destroy them directly and unnecessarily, drawing attention to them. 

It was only in the third decade of the new millennium that this control had been established globally and stabilized at a level that these men were reasonably satisfied with. Probably, for the first time in human history, this group of men had achieved stability across the world, albeit through complete subjugation. Those highly publicized annual meetings at that winter resort in the middle of Europe had finally started becoming quite tame, boring even, relative to the volatility seen in the first couple of decades of the century. They did not seek to change this equilibrium any further and were content in simply sustaining it as long as possible. 

To their immense chagrin, though, that brief yet blinding flame of a liberal democratic form of society had not been entirely snuffed out despite their titanic efforts. Somehow that barely alive flame had managed to fly under the radar and relocate itself to a new place where it was gently but surely nourished in isolation. The people who were nourishing it were not even aware what they were doing, yet. It had happened on its own, it seemed. Later, when historians would study this era, they would realize that the world had inadvertently embarked upon an experiment that had taken the best of moral philosophy and actually implemented it in real life. The ideas that those philosophers had long been articulating had somehow morphed from an aspiration into reality. And this had, finally, been recognized by the men in this room a year ago. 

Mr. B walked up to his chair at the head of the table and sat down. Mr. M stood at the other end of the table. The group had been discussing him, in fact. Now they were ready to deliver their judgment.

Mr. E cleared his throat and began, “A year ago, you - Mr. M - informed all of us about how your social media algorithms had picked up the signal of Sequoia’s steadily growing popularity. That popularity had started transforming into envy and some voices had started raising the possibility of copying the Sequoian model elsewhere in the world.” 

He looked around the table. Everyone nodded in agreement. So did Mr. M.

“We all decided that this needed to be stopped before it grew any further. The best way to nip this in the bud was to create circumstances because of which Sequoia would implode from within.”

Mr. M nodded again.

“You promised us that you would deliver this outcome. We agreed that it would take a fair amount of time to achieve this outcome in a way that looked organic in nature. That is, it shouldn’t appear to anyone that Sequoia had been destroyed from outside. Right?”

“Yes.”

“You have failed Mr. M. Quite spectacularly, if I may add.”

“May I explain?”

“Sure.”

“I believe that we were close to success with the strategy that had been selected. However, there were several factors that emerged in Sequoia that our algorithms had not accounted for.”

He knew he was giving excuses for his failure and this group was not in the habit of listening to excuses. But he felt that his excuses may hold useful insights for all of them. After all, they were going to have to come up with a new strategy now. 

“First, the two murders were opportunities that we leveraged to the hilt. You are aware of how the rioting spread not only in Sequoia but all across the world within a very short period of time. What our algorithms did not expect was that the two murderers to voluntarily and publicly confess. No one does that. Our algorithms were stumped with that. That was such a huge deviation from the model on its own that we haven’t been able to find any ways to counter it. 

“I suspect that our algorithms were perfectly tuned to the male psyche. Because of the utterly dominant role of men in the entire human history on which our algorithms are built, the female psyche is largely unknown. Men do sacrifice themselves. Men do have altruistic impulses. But those are usually entangled with notions of heroism. Those men do expect to be put on a pedestal for their actions. They do that for eternal glory, that is, if their actions led to their immediate demise. In sharp contrast, what those two women murderers did was pure charity. I am not sure I understand why they did that. The impact of their genuinely selfless actions was incomprehensible for our algorithms. That impact has completely drowned the tribal impulses that we had exploited in the Sequoian men. ”

“Second, the ability of the majority of the Sequoian population - specifically, traumatized women - to overcome their passivity and fear was another major deviation that we couldn’t do anything about. Not only were they not cowed into inaction, but instead, they decided to go on the offensive. They showed up in full force to physically dominate the minority of rioting men. Women behaving in this manner has never been seen anywhere in the world at any point in time. Women have always been subservient to men. What happened in Sequoia was the opposite - the men were subjugated by the women. Why they did what they did is, again, beyond my understanding. These two deviations together made our algorithms irrelevant.”

“Third, the emergence of the thought leadership that led to the expression of this new faith could not have been imagined by anyone. Prophets have existed. They have all been men. Their power has been expressed through tribal and invariably hierarchical structures. We are all familiar with those. In fact, we use those ideas to maintain the social order today in most of the world. But this new faith that embraces non-hierarchical and non-tribal concepts is so far different from anything we have experienced in history that we are now essentially in uncharted territory. Why it has emerged in Sequoia, we don’t know. Why is there no prophet or any tangible leadership for this faith, we don’t know. Why did this emerge organically, we don’t know. But it has emerged. And we have no algorithms that can capture what is happening in Sequoia right now.”

“I don’t want to given any credit to the people who designed Sequoia. I think, they were bumbling idiots who threw around some ideas among themselves and whatever got support from the most seemed to have stuck. But, I believe that they have inadvertently designed a society in Sequoia that defies our understanding of human society so far.”

Mr. E said, “hmm… I think those are interesting insights. Err… thanks!” 

He said that just to be polite to Mr. M. But he hadn’t been impressed by those so-called insights. He had never respected Mr. M. He felt that Mr. M was one more of those incompetent men who had failed upward throughout their lives and had ended up with so much money that he had to be included in this group. 

“We need to come up with a new strategy to take down Sequoia once and for all. Mr. J will be leading that operation. He shall brief us when he is ready in a few months?” he looked questioningly at Mr. J. 

“Yes, let’s meet again in six months,” indicated Mr. J. 

Everyone nodded their heads and the meeting ended.