Percy – Dissolving the Tribes – 064

My dear Byron, and esteemed friends,

You have set before us a gallery of human failings, each awaiting its own grotesque portrait. Mine is tribal hatred — that ancient poison that seeps into every border, banner, and birthright, until neighbour turns on neighbour, each convinced the other is a threat to be erased.

I take inspiration from Mr. Swift’s method of exaggeration, and propose thus:

Let us dissolve the tribes entirely. I mean this quite literally. Once every decade, all human beings shall be gathered and reassigned new names, languages, and ancestries by a great lottery of identity. No man will know his father’s tongue, no woman her grandmother’s village. The fierce patriot will awake to find himself sworn to a different flag, with no memory of the old one save in a fading dream.

In this way, all borders will blur within a generation. The xenophobe will discover that the stranger he despises was himself in the last cycle. The warmonger will hesitate before raising a sword, for fear that the next lottery will place that same blade in the hand of his own child.

Of course, there will be protests — lovers separated, heirs disinherited, poets robbed of their mother’s language. But given time, they will learn that affection, loyalty, and culture can be re-grown, and perhaps more richly than before.

It may seem cruel to uproot entire lives for the sake of a grand experiment, but is it not more cruel to let humanity go on killing itself over the accident of birth?

Yours in improbable unity,

— Percy