Chronicles From The Future: The amazing story of Paul Amadeus Dienach

by Unknown

  Lain says that every era generates its own questions, questions that the elders are called to answer for the youngest. And every era has its own characteristics. He said, for example, that the 20thcentury was characterised by people’s tremendous efforts to control forces, such as electricity, nuclear energy or solar energy. People began to dominate nature. In addition, the automation of work, due to the electrical and electronic devices created a problem that was not visible to the naked eye: the workers’ extra free time! In fact they argue that that self-determination given to the workers, mainly the industrial ones, was, according to many thinkers, one of the main reasons why human history and civilisation on earth took this course! Because that extra free time of the workers was filled with low-quality spectacles and entertainment in general, like gambling, prostitution, the speed races and sports games and vulgar popular mass media. Music was reduced to simple melodies and rhythms, the masterpieces of literature circulated in illustrated summaries and thought was considered a waste of time! Another characteristic of the time was that people lost their ability to distinguish the good from the bad and the beautiful from the ugly in art and creation...

  In the 21st century, the rural economy was put on the back burner. And as if the demographic problem wasn’t enough, a new, terrible issue made its appearance: the increasingly smaller area of arable land, which was constantly being eaten away by the increasingly expanding giant urban areas: the so-called urbanisation.

  By then, it was already a fact that food was no longer adequate and people started looking for nutrition alternatives and sources outside the boundaries of the food industry, mainly focusing—if Lain is to be believed—on seas and oceans, which gave the impression of an inexhaustible source of food.

  Thanks to scientific progress of the era, nutritional and edible substances could be extracted from plankton and the underwater flora and fauna. Artificial photosynthesis, however, had not yet come to the rescue of humanity.

  But the most tragic thing of all was still the “phantom of the number”. At this point in history was when the sentence “the coming years will be hostile” was first uttered. People lived in very tight spaces, but in colossal residential areas and many times they were forced to move around wearing masks because of the polluted air.

  In another field of life, the 21st century was marked by the first test flights with destination to the nearest alien lands…

  (Lost notes followed)

  At the same time, on our earth, the first serious and somewhat positive universal efforts were made to strike down the monster of anarchy, which tormented human societies for centuries and in many forms: political disorganisation, fights over sovereignty, military rivalries, plundering of national economies, demographic anarchy and the like. And so began a dramatic struggle that lasted approximately four centuries, with many alternating phases and transitions, a struggle between the ancient, but well-founded, beliefs and the new ideas about the organisation and rationalisation of life.

  The revolution in political organisation that was based on logic and humanity followed the exact path and time sequence of the two other great revolutions, the French of 1789 and Russian of 1917: first came the philosophers, intellectuals and theorists of the new world order, saying that as the form of organisation of the 19th and 20th centuries with the fully armed dominant nation states, which most positively led to holocausts and annihilation could not continue, and then—after a long period of time—followed the political activists, orators and social reformers.

  Mainly in continental Europe and Great Britain, the intelligentsia urged the political leaders of the large and powerful nations to stop their “outdated and unsynchronised course.”

  They preached prudence and sound reason and told them that the days when “the people had to fight for their rights” were long gone and that, old incentives and slogans like “national prestige”, “no compromise, no retreat” and “heroic course of the nation” had lost much of their value due to new conditions of life.

  They spoke of a “system of eternal values” that their European ancestors had bequeathed to the new generations and told them that they had to be the guardians of this sacred legacy, which was much larger and deeper than any of different ethnic roots or linguistic differences.

  They said that cultural heritage, historical traditions, the course of life and historical destinies were common to everyone. “We must unite both in life and in consciousness!”

  There was no need for extensive revolutions to take place in order for the new world order to be built on the ruins of the old regimes. To a large extent, pivotal international treaties were signed, and that was enough, at least initially.

  The new law and order followed more democratic paths since the days of the Pax Romana, although it took a long time and several attempts to establish it. The expectations of the proponents of the New Order were often wrong. Many were repeatedly persecuted before the New Order finally prevailed.

  While the small nations had no such “concerns about the future” in the 21stcentury, in the large and powerful countries new political alliances had begun to take shape, alliances that had integrated in the program some characteristics of European or universal federations. In fact, it was even reported that the old parties, the Socialists and the Christian Democrats, also added requirements of the new era to their programs.

  As the decades passed, these new ideas and perspectives found more and more fertile ground, especially in the hearts of young people and the lower social strata. And so, with the passage of time, the political arena began to acquire its first “great men with global recognition and appeal” for the first time in history, in contrast to the local leaders we had become accustomed to.

  Technological advances had eliminated distances and had brought people very close to one another. The world gave the impression of a single region, still politically disorganised, waiting for the “legislators” and the powerful politicians with global authority to permanently lay down the rules for the “organisation” of the planet. At the same time, man now had weapons of mass destruction in his control, unknown and inexistent in earlier times. The rapid technological acme, however, was not in line with the corresponding moral maturity and rationality. There was no “internal law”, a law of spiritual culture like the one they have now, which was needed as a guarantor of law and order.

  In our times, they said, we thought that ensuring the compliance with the law within each country separately was sufficient. War was for us a natural way of resolving serious disputes between nations. That was the state of mind we had before the 21st century.

  The 21st century had to come in order for people to suddenly realise that they were hovering above a frightening gap in the global public sphere and that their institutions were completely obsolete. So, gradually, the once dominant states began to bestow—deliberately or not—part of their previously almighty powers, especially in the fields of foreign policy, international relations and arms, to a central, federal political organisation. They kept their historical memories, traditions and customs, language, legends and their domestic institutions, but they had now realised that in a future war there would be no winners and losers. They would either stick together, or all together they’d lose. They began to see who the true enemy was: the lack of strong and effective global institutions with the preventive mission to control all forms of conflict. They finally realised that what united people—their common biological fate and their shared responsibility for the maintenance of culture—was more important than what separated them.

  The smaller nations were rather comfortable with their old social formations and had their own internal problems to worry about, so they were the last ones to adopt the new forms of organisation. The “Great Powers”, however, which had come to the fore in the 21st century, were struggling to understand one another. There was constant winning and complaints about the ways and criteria of the distribution of universal income. No one ever believed that their shar
e was fair…

  These “reactions” of the 21st century were meant to become the omen of the future “separatist movements”, which erupted repeatedly and were incited by the same “political nuclei” of the initial reactions! The requests were the same: demographic regulation and financial interests... For four whole centuries, sometimes the French or the Anglo-Saxons and other times the Germans or the Slavs revolted for “autonomy”, all with the same objective: to take the lead, from then on, in the historical course of mankind. “This fiery ordeal will pass,” they said, meaning the war they themselves had started. “Whatever happens is for your own good. The democrats are unable to give you the order that you need...”

  And the economic wars were usually followed by armed conflicts. In the latter they only used the old conventional weapon since the separatists had no access to the “forbidden ones”, but this did not prevent those conflicts from evolving, several times until the 24th century, into real, extensive wars with mass casualties that threatened the universal federation with outright collapse every single time.

  Eventually a bearable organisation was created, which, in its final form, lasted for many decades and paved the way for the end of prehistory, the new chronology, the coming of John Terring and the beginnings of the Eldere. However, separatist attempts appeared in the first hundred years of the new chronology as well, that is, almost until the end of the 25th century, as Lain said, but they were too weak and doomed to failure. Mostly, as we explained, they were condemned in the minds of the people of the Eldere, who no longer tolerated political anarchy, coups and the dominance of the strongest. During the last one and a half centuries of their prehistory (20th-24th century for them) the migration waves had been reduced to a minimum and the population had been equally distributed around the world, not only in central and northern Europe any more, but on the other continents too. The Scandinavians had not yet been invited to descend to the deserted southern regions up to the Mediterranean Sea for the purpose of re-colonisation after the debacle they had suffered just 87 years before the definitive establishment of the Retsstat and the beginning of the “new chronology”. The white race had now conquered all five continents... And from the Semitic peoples, about a hundred and twenty million Israelis—now most of them Christianised—were at the helm both culturally and economically in southwest Asia, having developed there a high level of techno-culture, always with the Holy Lands as its centre.

  Latino populations, mainly from South America, had colonised nearly all of the central areas of the African continent— you’d only see black people on very rare occasions. The warm now— thanks to the artificial air conditioning—Arctic regions were dominated by a brotherhood of Russians, Norwegians, Anglo-Saxons and other Baltic nations such as Finns, Poles, Danes and Canadians, while Antarctica—also characterised by a much more temperate climate thanks to human intervention—was colonised mainly by white South Africans (probably descendants of the Boers) and in the east by Australians and New Zealanders.

  East Asia was occupied almost exclusively by Slavs, who had come from the north, the descendants of North Americans from the western states and by a medley of Europeans, who could now fit more comfortably in all those fertile valleys, while several millions of Indians lived in the highlands of the centre of the continent and Tibet. In the Mediterranean, the Ottomans had retreated to Lake Van and the Greeks had re-inhabited Asia Minor, since their country as well as the North African coast had been evacuated. The latter was largely resettled, mostly by Italians, as soon as life there was possible again. This is mostly what I remembered and managed to copy from my books.

  This was the territorial status quo prevailing in the 23rd century and, in fact, the maintenance of this status quo had been guaranteed at the time—mainly by the white race, which was the big winner of the confrontations—in the ecumenical councils of the federal transnational democracy that had been established, with representatives of both the people and the governments of the member countries.

  In fact, I was surprised by the fact that the “civic spirit” of those who served in the armed forces of the now established universal authority was formed by special and long-term educational training. They removed them from their social environment and the environment of their national life at childhood and submitted them to special training in order to consider themselves citizens of the world and have a high level of general education. They handled the new electronic devices of universal legal order excellently and their number was incomparably smaller than the number of the armed forces of prehistory though their term of office was much longer. So it was only natural that there were more young scientists and technicians rather than officers and soldiers.

  They were also aware that they wouldn’t be forced to use their invincible firepower, on which they had the monopoly, and was only valuable as a kind of guarantee. Nevertheless, they had blind faith in the universal congress and, were taught at birth to forget their ethnic origin and consciously obey the dictates of the two Parliaments and the executive authorities of the federation.

  A similar sense of responsibility to humanity also suffused both the military and the members of the collective Executive office and the double parliament (the former elected by the people and the latter appointed by the governments). They all considered themselves devoted to the service of unity. I remember them being called “diplomatic agents of unity” and always “at the service of humanity”. Only secondarily did they consider themselves envoys of the people who had elected or appointed them. A type of the local leader still exists, but possesses limited powers because now international law has prevailed over domestic law.

  The institution of “unified citizenship” had already been introduced to all by the Anglo-Saxons Verchin and Milstone by the 22nd century. The shaping, however, of a common national consciousness was not directly obtained and in line with the ever more refined version of federal institutions. On the contrary, this formation took centuries and it was an extremely slow psychological process. Much later, after the first two centuries of the Eldere, a new “universal sense of ethnicity” began to mould. People began to realise that they were members of a single, universal, national and political community. Although historical memories had not, of course, died out, as I was told, more universal ideals started taking shape. “This is our country,” said the representatives of the new generation, looking up at the sky of our blue planet!

  At the end of the second century of their chronology—two hundred years or so after the time of John Terring—was the time that politicians had been freed from government responsibilities and replaced by the great technicians and other leading figures in natural sciences, who were now responsible for handling political power in the world over. The new leaders then introduced something that had started a long time ago: the establishment of a global federation of labour organisations—in the form of a political institution and not that of a trade union any more—and, following completely legal procedures, they turned these new cooperative collectives into the basis of economic life on earth. They were also the basis even of political life, I might add, if you consider that people had to participate in the glothners (their industrial units), registering for long-term occupation there, in order to obtain the right to vote. In those times, law and order had prevailed conclusively and convincingly. There was no longer fear of a separatist revival.

  However, the first centuries of the Eldere, even after the year 486 and the creation of the Rosernes Dal, was a one-sided era of technical civilisation and a true spiritual man, they say, would not have felt comfortable in such an environment of mechanocracy and materialism. The Valley of the Roses, Rosernes Dal, took a long time to pay off and many philosophers throughout history contend that the 9th century of the great intellectual creation is not itself a consequence of the directions of the Valley, nor exclusively the fruit of its spiritual influences. The Renaissance in spiritual values came late; approximately by 700 of their chronology.

  The mos
t characteristic features of the Eldere, their old age, is the prevalence of the ultimate and satisfactory order in the world, “the policy of the compass”, as they call it, which resulted in the rational course of collective life, good governance and administration, egalitarianism, universalism in political values—such as universal suffrage, equal rights, social justice, individual freedom, united sense of ethnicity and the highest personal safety—organised global production, abundance of food and all kinds of industrial products in general and generous distributions to the Cives not based on their contribution to production, but on each person’s needs. In addition to all that, there was also a meticulous birth monitoring for the sake of human dignity. For the first time in history, so far, they had achieved high living standards of the entire population without exception and the participation of all in the positive exploitation of the goods of material culture!

  And I, dazzled by the incredible number of images I saw on the Reigen-Swage, images of comfort and abundance in material goods, would prefer a thousand times to live a life travelling between Paris and Vienna after the Napoleonic wars... If I were to choose, I would gladly trade the mentally and socially insured restful life of the “master of the Eldere” with those decades. I’d gladly give up such a life of “safety and certainty for the future.” The Eldere seemed to me extremely lifeless in its first six hundred years, judging of course from those bits of life that I manage to see, here, on the Reigen-Swage.

  But Stefan and the others here more or less share the same opinion: that in the early centuries of the Eldere, peoples’ ability to experience an inner and more spiritual life was significantly reduced, nearly inexistent. Lulled by the sense of satisfaction concerning the abundance and quality of material goods and under the impression of happiness, as they say, the “thirst of the soul” had dwindled.

  That's why they argue that the contribution of the Eldere to the building of the true “inner culture” was minimal. That era only took pride in the quality standard of industrial goods and the more than sufficient production of them. Humans were considered numbers in statistical studies rather than personalities and spiritual entities. By “progress” they only meant economic and technological achievements. They conceived of happiness in terms of life comforts and adequate distributions. Happiness for them was an easy, enjoyable life with modest and limited esoteric thoughts. Prophets and artists no longer existed. Those who spoke of man’s metaphysical pain were considered morbid.