part 7

After a while, things began to change again. Eventually there were nearly twenty people in the land of the Xns who had learned to read, and some of them had a chance to read some things that had been written about the carpenter, including things he may actually have said. These, of course, nobody paid any attention to, but reading what other people had said about what they thought the carpenter must have meant, lead one of them to start saying that maybe the boss of the Xns really didn't have power of attorney of the carpenter after all, and maybe the cosmic ET really didn't like people in direct proportion to the amount of membership dues they paid.

For saying this, the boss of the Xns took away his hat, and probably wanted to set fire to him, but he lived too far away and had too many friends. So this new fellow just made up his own hat, and many other people decided that they actually liked his hat better and wanted one of their own, so they decided to give themselves a new name to go with their new hats, and called themselves Lns, although they still called themselves Xns too.

What the Lns also liked is that they didn't have to pay membership dues to the other Xns, who they called Ccs, just to keep the record straight. Keeping the record straight soon became too complicated to keep up with, because once it got out that you could make your own hat and not have to pay dues anymore, everybody was doing it, even though both the Ccs and the Lns tried to stop them. But people were generally better off, even though everyone who started wearing a new hat eventually had to start paying membership dues to somebody.

One thing the hats had in common is that by now they all had printed on them in bold letters, "The carpenter rules!" But if you asked the wearers of the hats what that meant, they all told you something different. Except they all agreed that only the people wearing the particular color hat that they happened to be wearing at the time, got to go the nice place the cosmic ET had made for them when they died.

Apparently the nice place is rather small and the cosmic ET and the carpenter only have room for a few close friends and you aren't one of them, so you will just have to go to the place where the bad ET will set fire to you and keep it going forever, (which as we pointed out in the beginning of this story, is a very long time) and I'm sorry, it's not my idea, that's just the way it is.

The other thing the hats had in common is that you didn't have to sign the contract to get one. Eventually there were Xns everywhere, even in places the nomads and the natives and the carpenter and the first Xns never ever knew existed.

They had invented all kinds of new ways to do things. Rather than stick sharp pieces of metal in people, they could drop things on them from thousands of miles away that would actually convert their juice directly into its constituent atoms without any intermediary steps and vaporize the container at the same time.

After a while, even hats grew out of fashion since membership cards were much more convenient and dues could be collected through automatic withdrawal. Often, when one flavor Xn got to arguing with another flavor Xn, they would both tell each other that one day the cosmic ET was going to send a great military leader, er, I mean, the carpenter, with a flaming sword to kill all the people the Xns didn't like and put them in charge.

But ultimately, Xns found the true way, a deeper, more meaningful, and more fulfilling commitment, the amalgam of slavery to religious dogmatism and indenture to economic idealism. At the heart of economic idealism is, of course, the charging of monetary interest, which in the time of the carpenter was called usury and was considered to be such a bad thing that usurers had to go with the bad ET when they died and be set on fire and so forth, but which was now simply a way for people who really didn't know how to do anything useful to gather limitless economic power and obscene wealth by taking money from people in direct proportion to how helpless they were to do anything about it. The carpenter had once pointed out that people cannot serve both their cosmic ET and their medium of exchange, but this problem was solved by simply printing the name of the cosmic ET right on the medium of exchange for everyone to see, which illustrates just how easily complex existential dilemmas may be resolved if you just have the right attitude, something all philosophers these days must learn when they get out of graduate school and find there aren't any jobs.

Xns everywhere, particularly in industrialized nations, have now evolved into the most content of all hominids. They can watch people screaming on television anytime they want, they have plenty of toilet paper and reclining chairs, and they may devote the entirety of their lives to the acquisition of all manner of additional consumer goods without ever having to give a thought to any examination of their behavior, their reasoning, or their belief systems, let alone the meaning of the contract the carpenter offered them, or the return in consciousness to holistic unity. They can be assured of lives of continuous consumerism utterly free of the consequences of materialism since every act is justified because the world will end soon anyway.

And when their lives are over, and they stand at the door to the nice place the cosmic ET has made for only the right people, it doesn't matter at all how they have lived or what they have done, just as long as they have their membership card.

The End