A Parable

Suppose for a moment you are a highly sophisticated visitor from a powerful, seafaring country. You have arrived on an island, isolated from the rest of the world, and filled with aboriginal people of disparate tribes and customs.

You are an explorer and a trader and make your living by developing resources to take back to your land.

You have learned from countless expeditions that, when confronted with your technology, undeveloped indigenous cultures frequently perceive you as some kind of god figure. You have used this to your advantage in the past, but this method generally results in your ultimate exposure as a fraud and in a mad dash for the boat to save your life. Some of your colleagues, not as fleet footed as you, perished due to this tactic.

You are interested in a strange cargo – but, due to the ramifications of the Heisenburg Uncertainty and the Hawthorne Effect, an impossible one to openly collect. For the sake of this discussion, call this cargo "recordings of negative emotional content". Aldous Huxley called them "feelies" in finished form. For this treasure to be of high quality and valuable to your clients, it must be robust and contain extreme levels of emotional content. It must not be manufactured for the purpose, acted out, exaggerated or inhibited in any way. If the subjects know you are watching, their behavior will be affected and the emotional content will be spoiled.

Pornography is a naturally attractive commodity, but tends to rapidly loose its appeal as the physical and cultural disparity between subject and audience increases.

Love stories are counterproductive. While love may indeed be classed as an emotion, actual love has a debilitating effect on all markets.

No, your customers demand more.

So over time, the commodity of choice has become recorded images of conflict and war, and images of repression and subjugation´s ravages upon a social organism. Drama, in short.

You have learned that indigenous peoples in closed systems (islands) will generally resolve their natural territorial behavioral issues in one of two ways. Either the stronger group will annihilate the weaker, absorbing the survivors into their own culture, or, the two (or more) groups will evolve a kind of live-and-let-live policy, provided space and resources allow mutual survival. In either case, the level and textures of emotional content you desire are simply not present when nature is allowed to take its course.

To sustain profitability, you must engineer the situation accordingly.

On a very large planet, the seas contain vast numbers of islands. The planet´s attributes are naturally conducive for bringing forth abundantly. There is no foreseeable shortage of places to go to harvest your commodity. The world is your oyster.

Your trading associates comprise something of a cartel and operate under a kind of magisterial authority that ensures long-term production. The authority operates in something of a mercantilist manner. There are rules one must abide by, though they are unrestrictive and deregulated in all but the most general sense. The authority strictly enforces only two basic rules.

The first rule is obvious. You cannot prematurely roll into a new development zone and turn your superior technology upon the aboriginals to destroy them en masse, capturing the enormous levels of fear and panic, highly emotional content indeed, and sell that on the open market. While there are pirates who practice this, the authority takes great pains to make this endeavor cost prohibitive. If a cartel member is found with this type of contraband, one´s license is suspended. Restoration fees alone are prohibitive and would annul any profits one could make in a lifetime. As a result, piracy is seldom practiced. When it is, it leaves few witnesses.

The second rule is even more stringently enforced than the first, and is one pirates seldom transgress. Never tell the indigenous the truth. The spread of truth in an uncontrolled manner will spoil an economic zone and render it completely unprofitable. Oddly, pirates were once sanctioned by the authority to mitigate the effects of the spread of truth. Pirates and privateers were allowed to profit from the emotional images this mitigation produced. Over time however, the uncontrolled spread of truth was contained and these pirates were ejected from the cartel.

A logical extension of rule two is the prohibition and suppression of communication between islands. Each island population must believe it is alone. Aboriginal legend of the culture´s arrival on the island will allude to the presence of other inhabited lands, but the existence of routine travel must not be revealed.

Both the rules ensure longevity of profits through the conservation of resources. A trader who assiduously obeys the rules will make a handsome profit for many years.

Signs of any informational cross-contamination with other islands are apparent early on in each expedition, and these locales are handled in specific ways. Once an isolated indigenous culture becomes aware of the truth, either through their cleverness or your carelessness, the area becomes useless for the cartel. Corrective actions are generally limited to include abandonment by the cartel, placement of appropriate marker buoys and cartographic annotations. All too often this results in a resurgence of piracy in the area, but this in itself produces a corrective action that is extremely effective, though not officially sanctioned by the authority. When confronted with contamination, it is best to act quickly and quarantine infected indigenous persons or areas.

The occasional, annoyingly sensitive and perceptive individual will be dealt with as needed to maintain law two enforcement. The best defense against the spread of truth is an overabundance of information containing the truth. A high volume of information is adequate camouflage.

Cartels, being essentially corporations, exist as entities. They are composed of individuals but invariably survive their constituents. As such, cartels develop standard operating procedures. They practice methods that are time tested and proven to repeatedly produce acceptable results.

Islands, which have already been visited, are marked on all standard charts and are identified by buoys placed within clear view of approaching vessels.

A particularly popular strategy among cartels is a long-term development program that initially astounds the indigenous with some minor technology and thereby inserts itself into the collective myth memories of the culture. This "shock and awe" tactic establishes the trader as a powerful god-king among the inhabitants and can be used to lead them in very specific directions. This strategy is particularly useful in group agitation and conflict development. Several indigenous species can be convinced they each have a direct connection to God. This inevitably leads to some very compelling confrontations among inhabitants. In addition, this action can be useful years later in return visits to the island by the cartel.

This method is not merely profitable on the macro scale. On the micro scale, as individuals reach their threshold level of power lust and greed, and begin to betray their fellows for control, some exceedingly entertaining emotional outcomes can be expected. Subjugation due to caste and class systems invariably develops and scenes of individual suffering are prevalent. Slavery and genocide of various kinds are always popular themes. This motif is best developed early in the island´s seeding phase.

Cartels have long practiced island seeding which promotes tension and emotional content opportunities for many generations. Seeding is generally accomplished by sedating and relocating members of selected indigenous cultures to uninhabited or cleared islands.

It is essential that the cartel train the indigenous in a proper value system. Along with manufacturing techniques for armaments, early indoctrination in the valuation and worth of certain materials is important, as well as a high value placed upon external personal appearance. Cosmetology and sexual enhancement are fundamental developmental tools the cartel has used successfully.

Developing a high value and respect for authority among the indigenous is paramount. This is accomplished by the development of a priest-king class early on in the "shock and awe" phase and by the commensurate cross breeding of cartel members and locals. Advanced armaments are essential in projecting this authority throughout the island.

The cartel must properly manage the professional guilds and academics. See Secret Societies below. Specialization and the inculcation of a narrow viewpoint are essential. The adoption of a belief in the value of a specialized education is important to truth suppression. Elsewhere outside of higher education, the general level of indigenous education should only be allowed to produce the necessary support for the leadership and the value system. There should be made available several means of distraction for the general indigenous population. There should be a generally passive but ubiquitous disdain for education among the indigenous population. Where the general indigenous population appreciates the educated, the respect should be based on the level of specialization involved in the education.

Over long periods of time, the cartel may begin to loose the advantage of anonymity, and the host culture may become aware of its presence. This can be a time of difficulty in terms of the cartel´s ability to move and operate at a profit.

These junctures are usually associated with the level of technological development of the indigenous species. The indigenous will arrive at a technological level over time that threatens both the cartel´s profits and the indigenous species´ survival. This point will arrive slowly, but will escalate exponentially within about five to six generations. It is important the cartel establish clandestine relations with the indigenous authority very early in this period, simultaneous with the exponential increase.

One of the hazards of the early education in armaments during the "shock and awe" phase is that the propensity for subsequent technological development by the indigenous remains anchored to the development of implements of control. This trend ultimately leads to weapons of mass destruction, which of course, the indigenous shall not be permitted to use without supervision. An adjunct of this developmental pattern is the increased accuracy of indigenous intelligence gathering, and their ability to perceive the contemporary and historical activities of the cartel. Intelligence gathering organizations usually fall under the jurisdiction of the secret societies so any negative impact will be greatly reduced and amount to mainly the occasional renegade event.

Inevitably, the cartel must develop associations with the indigenous leadership. Where the hierarchy of a particular indigenous culture can be coerced into cooperation with the cartel, the availability of quality emotional recordings is increased greatly. There is the occasional blowback – where the sell-out threshold tips in favor of the official´s conscience to advocate for one´s own people – but this is usually only a negligible percentage. Under these circumstances, the remainder of the hierarchy can be depended upon to enact corrective measures. Difficulties can be reduced if a standard operating procedure is followed to help manage the indigenous leadership liaison.

Secret Societies are essential to the proper development of indigenous administration. Early care in the development of secret societies will ensure full control of the relationship. Secret societies should exclusively produce the leaders of the indigenous culture. Where the cartel controls the secret society, little or no direct cartel activity is required to control the culture as a whole. Society members will become leaders and will naturally provide for the needs of the cartel. This is facilitated by the pyramidal structure of the properly developed secret society. Such societies are of course truth-managed and the highest level of the order has but a dim view of the depth of cartel involvement and intention. The secret order will be island wide and will command a loyalty beyond the reach of geopolitical boundaries. Properly managed development of secret societies will ensure that the order perceives itself as serving the best interests of the indigenous culture, and this despite the costs incurred by any individuals.

Eventually all island cultures will mature to a point where the cartel can no longer operate with any anonymity. This transition is accompanied by the indigenous government´s belief in its own superiority. It will attempt to modify, control and thwart the cartel relationship, and to renege on arrangements it has with cartel management. The sociotechnological level of the indigenous species will dictate when this point is reached. Where recalcitrant individuals having little or no loyalty to the cartel assume positions of authority within the indigenous culture, unlikely as that may be, self-correction mechanisms such as physical or character assassinations (good material in themselves) are recommended. To accomplish this, intelligence and law enforcement agencies must be closely supervised – or adequately infiltrated.

Fortunately the tension between those who would resist the cartel´s control of the indigenous population and those who firmly support it´s authority is kept in check by the pervasive influence of the various secret social organizations. The cartel, through its control of the indigenous intelligence gathering structures, will be enable it to easily act across indigenous political and geographic boundaries. Influenced indigenous agencies begin to understand that, in so far as they can threaten the cartel, they can do so only through the control of information. The secret societies interact with both the cartel and the indigenous culture by way of this information. They will begin to understand that control of information is their source of power.

Our islands are our natural resources. They must be protected and cultivated with great care. Eventually each island reaches maturity and has been successfully exploited for many generations. While time spans vary, the broad developmental steps remain consistent. With the indigenous´ realization they are being exploited and have been for the extent of their "history" comes the time of divestment in the culture. It can no longer be effectively recorded. The point of diminishing profits will have been reached. Culture rotation is required.

Several methods have been established for rotation. Of course abandonment and the inevitable piracy that follows is wasteful and unpredictable. Rapid cultivation and reseeding is a highly profitable alternative. Although costly and labor intensive this method is preferred by most conservationists, is approved by cartel administration and is tax deductible. In only a relatively short time, most islands can be completely reseeded. If left in a cleared condition they may also be converted to vacation resorts or sold to the military for testing sites.