Shape Up or (we’ll) Flip Out
Once upon a time there was a land where Conformity was the Only Virtue. As long as you supported the Leaders, you belonged, you were loved, and you got benefits - like admission to the House of Virtue, where all the other virtuous people went to parade around in their best cool clothes and be seen and admired for their virtue-ism. It was hard to get in, because you had to answer a whole list of virtue questions – the right way, of course. Which was of course either “yea” or “nay”, but nothing in between. No “Well, it’s complicated and we have to consider...”; No “It all depends on (fill in the plenteous blanks here)”; No “Usually I would agree except in this case”; No “No, I don’t think so.” NEVER EVER EVER “I don’t think so.” Because of course in the Land Where Conformity Was The Only Virtue (acronym-ically “Lucutov”), you weren’t supposed to independently THINK for yourself, perish the thought. (People had even been carefully cultured from pre-K on up to look all alike, and had their wings clipped as babies so they wouldn’t fly away. (Yes, people had wings in those days and in that place. The explanation being a polygamous intergalactic flying ancestor with dominant genes who arrived on an exploratory expedition and stayed. stayed. stayed. stayed. stayed. stayed. with ever so many wives. The result being of course that the dominant wing gene widely dominated, as dominant genes will do, and the whole population was eventually full of winged humans (and numberless container loads of unwearable 2-armed clothes).
The wings greatly enhanced their physical mobility of course; but soon that ability to get outtatown engendered a concommitant new mental emancipation. Therefore, the peoples’ brains burst forth (developmentally, not literally), as did their knowledge and culture. It became an intensely glorious world. So much so that it attracted the radio telescopic attention of the evil jealous brother-in-law of this intergalactic ancestor; who beamed himself down surreptitiously one foggy morning and blended in with all the be-winged locals. (He wore a holographic mask, so his sister and bro-in-law wouldn’t recognize him.) He slither-slunk around, becoming more and more covetous – until finally he (literally) exploded into view, utilizing some cosmic pyrotechnics to wow their senses and cause them to fall at his clawed feet in awe and reverence (fear and trembling.) (They still had toes, so those claws made an impression.) From then on, he gathered them under his wing – not as compassionate mama chicken, but rapacious papa raptor – intent on corralling their capabilities for his own arrogant aggrandizement. He instituted comprehensive mind control and programmed them down to their DNA with the conviction that Conformity Was The Only Virtue. (There was also Pavlovian conditioning in the rewards department having to do with Cheetos and video games, so he had them all good and happy and right where he wanted them.) The only problem was that as soon as they lost their independence of mind and soul, they also lost the ability to create all the goodies that had so wowed him in the first place. So, counterproductively (as most evil actors tend to act; evil and stupidity being as intertwined as they are), he commenced to double down even more with force and punishments in his best “whip a dead oxen” act…. clipping wings in newborn nurseries and attaching age-incremental little weights to babys’ legs, while medicating older ones with precision calibrated molecules that make Orwell’s Soma look positively medically moribund.
Thus he led them carefully and contentedly down that slippery slope to the underworld of mentally and physically circumscribed slavehood. (oh btw - eventually those container loads of previously unusable 2-winged clothes came in handy again, despite being somewhat out of style and a little moth-eaten. The moral being that you should never make fun of people with cluttered closets; they might be onto something.)
Anyway. In a nutshell (which is where all the best stories fit after all), the Evil Interloper – whose name was actually Illbert but who insisted on being called Your Unctious Majesty (the middle name cuz he was ironically insistent on denominative accuracy) – tried and tried, but he could NOT completely suppress the peoples’ thinkers or feelers. Their minds and hearts. For as they had once tasted the heady heights of sublime liberty, and were thus deeply imprinted forevermore, they could not be completely smashed and tamed. It was a glorious, yet deeply tragic thing. What happened to them, you ask?
Why, look in the mirror. 