| Xen: Ancient English Edition by D. J. Solomon |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
People often condemn those willing to use any means necessary to obtain their goals.
Businessmen who pollute the environment to generate income are derided. Policemen
who torture prisoners to obtain confessions are charged with crimes. But should a poor
mother who robs the pharmacy to provide medicine for her dying child be arrested?
Does the end ever justify the means? On March 22, 1980, R.C. Christian erected the
Georgia Guidestones, a structure engraved with ten goals that human kind must achieve
to reach the “age of reason.” In Xen: A Novel from the Future, humanity lives in a
utopian world where these goals have been met, but only after a scientist named Dr.
Pawkey Seneschal created a virus that decimated mankind and genetically modified the
survivors. While most people might consider this sacrifice of human lives immoral and
inhumane, “translator” D.J. Solomon suggests, by contrasting the past and present
worlds of Xen, that the end of reaching the “age of reason” in our world can justify any
means.
The ten principles of the Georgia Guidestones will ultimately lead to the betterment of
humanity, but in Xen they must be achieved by extreme means. These principles can be
classified into four areas of improvement in “governance and the establishment of a
world government, population and reproduction control, the environment and man’s
relationship to nature, and spirituality.” While the achievement of these improvements
would certainly give rise to an ideal society, humankind’s long history has firmly
entrenched the values that oppose them. The goals can only be achieved through the
death of countless people through atrocious means.
When the Georgia Guidestones were created, the world population was at 4.45 billion,
with a growth rate of 18.5%. Without a catastrophic event that decimates our population
and diminishes our reproductive ability, we can never “maintain humanity under five
million in perpetual balance with nature.“ In Xen, however, mankind lives in a world where
this goal has been achieved. While the population is not yet fallen under five million, the
excessive population and birth rate of the past has been significantly reduced by
“plague” (169). The birth rate is now “ever so slightly greater than the mortality
statistics,” (154) and because the population is so much smaller than before, anyone
can have anything they wish. At the cost of countless human lives, people can now have
anything from “6000 square feet housing” to “one pound gold bricks,” (140) no longer
struggling to survive but living an ideal life of luxury.
If the “plague” had been caused by Wind and Water, the creation of this utopia could be
justified as the work of nature. When Wind and Water made a bet about the fate of
humankind, however, they vowed to not “cause upheaval of such magnitude that
Mankind is either saved or lost” (13). Without their interference, we can conclude that
the “plague” was not a natural event but a man-made disaster. In fact, it was a scientist
named Dr. Pawkey Seneschal who deliberately created the virus that annihilated most of
Earth’s human population. For fifteen years, he struggled to earn enough money to build
a laboratory where he would create a chromosome that would kill all “scumbags” (178).
Even in the knowledge that he himself would also die, he completed the plan in order to
fix the world.
Ironically, in the post-plague world of Xen, taking a life in order to save another life is not
justified. The people in Xen cannot “harm anyone else consciously or unconsciously”
(155) because of the way their nervous system is programmed. They could not even
imagine murder as an option for solving a problem. When these people find out about
Dr. Seneschal’s creation of the plague that destroyed billions of lives, they understood
that it was because of him that they now lived in such peace and abundance without the
fear of being robbed or killed by the scumbags. While they felt genuine sorrow for those
who died, they did not feel that these deaths were justified.
Although the post-plague humans believe that what Dr. Seneschal did was wrong, the
only survivors of the plague are people with “kindness in their hearts” (179), unable to
judge without bias any event that involved harming others. In order to judge Dr.
Seneschal objectively, one must compare the conditions of the world before and after
the plague, determine if there were any other acceptable methods of changing the world,
and conclude whether the cost was worth the gain.
An overview of a pre-plague world filled with misery and sorrow is offered in “Book 6:
History.” Wind describes how tens of thousands of people were brutally slaughtered over
differences in religion, nationality, or belief. He relates in gruesome detail the sadistic
nature of men who would hang a dog, disembowel a cat, and starve animals “for sport”
(86). Pre-plague mankind treated fellow human beings the same, if not worse, through
torture, rape, and imprisonment. “Book 2: Scientist I” shows how negatively pre-plague
man views his environment. Even though he is well educated, Dr. Seneschal believes
that all blacks have “subhuman intelligence” (16) and that Mexican Americans are even
worse off. He focuses solely on the sexual characteristics of women, and always refers to
his wife as his “bitch wife” (33). Nothing seems to satisfy him, from the conference that
he is attending to the hotel that he stays in.
It is clear that mankind can never achieve the four ultimate goals of the Georgia
Guidestones and the age of reason without the help of an external agent. Of those four,
maintaining a good relationship with the environment and nature seems impossible due
to our omnivorous human nature. The pre-plague humans were “encouraged, no
entreated to consume calories from the flesh of cattle, the bellies and muscles of pigs,
as well as similar parts of birds and fish and, … sheep and goats as well as crustaceans,
reptiles and amphibians” (40). With such a large population encouraged to eat meat, the
pre-plague world strained the Earth’s ability to produce enough food. In Xen, however,
people can maintain harmony with the environment because they have been genetically
modified. They are all vegetarians because “mankind’s teeth and digestive systems
could no longer process” meat (161). As eating vegetables requires less land than
raising animals for their meat, both the land and the animals are preserved. Without
genetic modification a massive reduction of the population, mankind in the pre-Plague
world would never be capable of living in harmony with the environment.
If one is convinced that Homo sapiens will never be able to reach the age of reason by
themselves, one can judge that Dr. Seneschal was right to create a virus that would
change humankind forever. Unless an external agent helps, the four ultimate goals of
the Georgia Guidestones can and the age of reason can never be achieved by humans.
Since ancient times, wars have built a tremendous hatred among countries. Societies
were “willing to send young members of their culture … in order to kill similar members of
their opposition and then become the law and order of that land, forcing their will upon
the vanquished” (84). How such humans transform themselves into beings capable of
ruling “external disputes in a world court” with integrity? In today’s world, the United
Nations has tried to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict ever since 1947, even forming the
United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. However, more than 50 years later, due
to the fundamental differences in belief and the long standing hatred between Arabs and
Jews, bombs are still raining down on the Gaza strip while Hamas launches rockets into
Israel. Unless such hostilities are eliminated altogether, it will be impossible to set up a
world court that every country will follow. As for spirituality, in a world which most wars
were caused due to differences in faith and religion, people cannot live without
“proselytizing” others and having “forced conversions or intolerance” (160), as do the
post-Plague people in Xen.
Dr. Seneschal converted the pre-Plague world where humans killed one another
unjustly, where prejudice and racism were rampant, and where people were never
satisfied, to the post-Plague world where harmony, longevity, and abundance prevail.
While he deliberately killed billions in the process, including himself, they were the only
roadblocks to the utopian world. If Dr. Seneschal had not changed mankind, its only
other option would be to “destroy himself” (11). With no way for mankind to improve
himself, and without the help of Wind and Water to reduce the population, the only
solution to his problem was the annihilation of scumbags and the genetic modification of
survivors. Faced with a choice between a destruction of all mankind and its salvation, Dr.
Seneschal made the only correct choice possible. Even though he knew that he himself
would die in the process, he achieved what he considered best for humanity.
Works Cited:
Solomon, D.J. Xen: A Novel from the Future. Whiteville: Avar Press, 2004.
Editor's note: The Guidestones call for a reduction of population to 500,000,000, not
the 5,000,000 noted above.
Hyeon Jin (Gordon) Bae Justifying Mass Murder through Xen Harvard University Cambridge, MA |
| © Copyright 2004-2009 by Avar Press. All rights reserved. Copyright of the individual essays belongs to the respective writer and may not be reproduced in any fashion without express written permission from each author. Interested parties may contact the author via their school or by sending correspondence to Avar Press. |
| First Place $1000.00 Scholarship 2009 |
