In Whose Hands

“Escape from this national accounting will inevitably become increasingly difficult… …and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are men of practical life, not sentimental intellectuals and they will scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that very soon the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of social life in common will have become a habit.”

Vladimir Lenin

In whose hands does the power lie? This is the question that must be asked at every level and every moment. Magic is the story. It is the story that we occupy is a means of moving agency. It is the power to act. It is the responsibility for one’s actions around the game board that is human social interaction. Stories that accumulate power must use that power. And the hands that control the distribution and allocation of that power are what you must always keep in mind.

If you lose control of your story, your magic, you lose control of your power. In doing so, you lose your freedom. Because freedom is nothing less than that power to act.

Consolidation and industrialization make humans into interchangeable parts in a large machine. The individual stories become irrelevant. The individual humans become replaceable, and thus powerless within that system. Systems that are not centrally controlled and are not scaled up may be less efficient and will likely never ‘maximize production’. But they remain under the control of the individual or the tribe or the community. They may not produce ‘optimum’ amounts of anything. But they can produce sufficient amounts of everything.

The question for continued growth is the goal of the king, not the peasant. The individual does not benefit from having more than necessary. Such things only benefit the king and the state.

The secret of magic and the story is that it either breaks the chains of forges ever larger ones. The story is like a nuclear reaction, it does not care if it powers a reactor or devastates a city. The story is a technology to be used. The magic of the story is mankind’s oldest technology. It is deception raised to an artform and given power over the lives of all it touches. And you will either master it, or somebody else will use it to master you.

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