A brief history of the world

Boyan Rashev

Once upon a time, there were two tribes that lived far apart, with the Great Water between them. Quite by chance, on the same day, clever people from both tribes invented the wheel while trying to haul a pile of felled wood to their villages. A historic moment!

The Wise Ones, who lived west of the Big Water, always discussed important events and made consensual decisions about their future. They were very smart, thought long-term, and always distributed the goods among all members of the tribe. The benefits of the idea were obvious – they could carry loads more easily over long distances. The inventor was enthusiastic and wanted to start making new wheels right away. But the Wise Ones were called that because they always took into account the risks associated with everything new. So, they sat around the campfire in the evening and began a discussion about the risks:

- The bike is dangerous! When we were going downhill, we picked up speed and almost crushed the Gray Mouse...

- We'll need too much wood to make the wheels! We'll waste our fuel resources and won't be able to keep warm...

- Only the Inventor knows how to make wheels! He will have a monopoly and will charge too much for each wheel. He will become too rich...

- To assemble the wheel, you need metal! And there is little of it and we should use it wisely and only for the most important applications – arrowheads, spears, axes…

It was the turn of the leader, the Old Owl, the Wisest of the Wise Ones, who was so insightful that he could foresee the future seven generations ahead:

- If we start making wheels, we will be able to carry more wood with fewer people. The Cracked Beaver will bring 3 cubic meters of wood by himself, and the Plucked Wolf will be out of work. This is a social problem. He can go to the hole and extract ore. That way we will make more spears and arrows. We will be able to kill more buffalo. If we kill more buffalo, after seven generations they will die out. What will we eat? Besides, we will have run out of proven reserves of metal in the hole. How will we make more weapons? We will go back to the Stone Age! The wheel will help us travel faster. However, for this we will need wide and well-trodden paths. The Plucked Wolf can make paths. But if there is a path to the river, the Dumb Duck and the Quacking Goose will carry water faster and one of them will be out of work. He can go and extract salt from the hole. However, after seven generations the proven reserves of salt will run out. We will run out of salt and our great-grandchildren will die from a potassium-sodium imbalance! In addition, we will trample so many paths that we will destroy the arable land and we will not be able to produce enough food. We are facing an eco-catastrophe! The wheel must be forgotten and no one should ever dare to recreate it. I said, haw!

And so they did. They hit a pipe, broke the prototype of the wheel, and cut off the hands and tongue of its inventor so that no one could learn more about him.

The Free Ones who lived east of the Big Water were aylak – quite disorganized and not in the habit of thinking too long. They relied more on the Invisible Hand – a mystical belief that if everyone looked out for their own interests without directly harming others, things would eventually work out well for everyone. They too saw the benefits of the invention. Most paid no particular attention, but two or three of the craziest among the Free Ones, without thinking about the possible risks, quickly set about making new wheels. Within a year, everyone in the tribe had a prototype of a two-wheeled cart. Well, a few people died before they thought of equipping them with brakes… After a few years, the metal in their hole ran out, but they began to exchange the finished wheels for ore from their neighbors. They made roads and were able to transport food to where there was hunger. The free people multiplied and the wild animals decreased, but the Madmen, who were also lazy, figured out a way to raise them in the villages so that they wouldn't have to hunt every time...

Thousands of years have passed… The Free Ones have moored their ships on the shores of the Wise Ones. They see some half-naked savages chasing buffalo and wondering how to drag the prey to their village without knowing the wheel. They have released the Smiting Hand, the Firewater and the Smallpox and have quickly conquered the new lands. However, some have taken up the study of the Wise Ones and have brought their wisdom back to their homeland.

More years passed… Wars were fought in the homelands of the Free Ones, because among them there were many Sages who wanted to rule, and the Mad Ones could not tolerate restrictions. Because of this, the latter set off across the Great Water to seek freedom. Thus, gradually, a large part of the Free Ones settled in the western lands, and too many sensible gene pools remained in their homeland. The wisdom of the eastern Sages became so great that they managed to create a gigantic planned empire with satellite vassal states, in which everyone had to be equal, and therefore they killed or at least threw into a concentration camp every Free One who did not manage to escape in time. Their wise development reached its apogee with the production of the Moskvich – a four-wheeled cart that moved thanks to the energy from the burning of a liquid that they extracted from the ground. Of course, its prototype, as well as the technology for extracting the burning liquid, were stolen by the Free Ones – it was no coincidence that they also called it the Opel Fiatovich. The Empire almost took over the entire ancestral homeland of the Free Ones. It was good that the Smiting Hand of the Free Ones was across the Great Water to protect it. Over the years, the Empire crouched, because in the absence of the Free Madmen, no one invented anything new and finally had to beg the Free Ones for food and machines.

It seemed that history was coming to its natural end… However, the more surpluses the Free created, the more reason and laziness increased among them. And so in the western lands of the ancestral homeland of the Free, a Union of Reason was created, governed by a Commission of Wisdom. In the Union, they began to take more and more of what the Mad created, to distribute to everyone else, so that inequality would be equalized. As a result, the class of the Mad was formed, which quickly grew so much that it became a structurally determining electorate. The Smart quickly realized that in order to be in power they had to do everything to satisfy the Mad, so they came up with the concept of an Unconditional Basic Income. It no longer mattered much to people's lives whether they created, so everyone had an incentive to remain Mad.

Moreover, inspired by the beautiful legend of the ancient Sages, the Wisdom Commission decided that people should live in such a way as to satisfy the needs of the present without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to satisfy their own needs. And they began to apply the ancient Sages' approach to risk management. Everything new that they or their cousins on the other side of the Great Water invented was subjected to thorough examination and… rejected. Because nothing new is 100% safe, and they did not want to violate their comfort, standard and peace. They were the Cradle of Civilization, weren't they? What could happen to them if they gave up this and that and didn't make trouble for themselves with the third thing, which on top of everything was invented by their Crazy Western cousins? What if their gas became cheap, their yields were constantly growing, their search engine knew everything, and they also guarded the entire world of Freedom with their Smiting Hands? Big leek, the ancestors of the Union of the Intelligent were the first to invent the wheel! They didn't give themselves either nature or future generations...

So the Union stopped creating, and if they did invent something new, they were in no hurry to produce it before some distant Madman tried it first. They wouldn't risk their asses in vain! They simply followed the principle of caution of the ancient Reasonable, which in a small territory in the lower right corner of the Union map was so ingrained in the gene pool through the folk wisdom "If only it had sat still, it wouldn't have seen a miracle!" that a particularly high concentration of Madmen was formed. And the Madmen began to migrate across the Great Water again, and with them brains and hearts flowed. But what the heck... Wasn't the Union developing sustainably? Or not quite?

One day in the Wisdom Commission, where they were still children of the Free, they realized that things were going badly. However, instead of returning to the Invisible Hand that had once made them Masters of the World, they sat down and wrote the Europe 2020 Strategy. It consisted of a set of wise and coordinated actions by the Wisdom Commission, to achieve something that only the Craziest among the Free can: Create and move forward – without looking back, without delaying, without turning around!

That's the end of the story... For now. I don't like it. If you don't like it either and you feel Free, you can only change it if you're Crazy enough to stay and fight.

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