Section of Novel, Part 3, draft

I was going to be turning 40 in about a year. I had a good life. I was happily married for four years. We had a three year old son and a girl was on the way, expected in about four months. I had an okay job that paid the bills. But I felt a bit adrift.


Someone had left a book on the seat on the train. I picked it up and started reading. It was called “The Fun and Productive Approach”.


The book was all about how to make what was fun also productive and what was productive also fun.


I flipped to the chapter aimed at middle age and read it on the ride. I put it in my bag when we got to my stop.


I started thinking about how to apply the approach in my life. Work was by its definition productive. It was not terribly fun. I started to think about fun aspects of the work. I did actually enjoy tracking my productivity. I didn’t enjoy the work so much. I worked in a billing office for a hospital. I appealed services we provided that were denied by the insurer. And I wrote off what we couldn’t recover.


Boring work. But I did find tracking my productivity interesting, as I said. The book recommended looking for ways to expand on such activities at work. The book suggested maximizing the stuff you enjoyed and minimizing what didn’t.


So maybe I could ma omission the analytical aspect of my job. I could start with my own data but I also had access to all the data our billing department handled. I could analyze that data and see if I could see opportunities for better billing policies.


That was something I could do more generally. I liked looking at data on a spreadsheet and learning about analytic techniques and statistics and math. I could collect all sorts of data. People had little computerized bracelets that could track data on themselves. I could play around that data.


So that was a thought. I liked writing. A lot of my work was communicating with people. I didn’t like the phone but I liked emailing. That was writing. So I could write emails. Avoid phone calls. I wasn’t great at talking anyway but was pretty good at writing. So maybe. Could focus more on thoughtful emails showcasing my I hope, intelligence.


I could write up studies of data for insight and email it to higher ups. If they like what they see maybe they might suggest I get a higher position that is a better fit for me.


But I should also look for other jobs that seem like a natural fit. More analytic I guess.


But there were some good little practical suggestions. The book talks about turning the boring stuff into interesting stuff by pairing it with something fun or interesting. Like listening to an audiobook when you’re driving in traffic on your commute.


I had an e-reader that had a text to audio function that let me listen to books, PDFs, other stuff. A lot of my work wasn’t too demanding so I could listen to interesting books while I did that stuff. Or listen to podcasts. It was an obvious insight but not one i really exploited. So I did that more and ended up getting through around five hours of book reading by simply listening while doing boring stuff in the day. That amounted to around 150 pages a work day or 750 pages a week, which itself was about 2 books.


I told a coworker about the book. His name was John and he was in a similar place in her life, married, two kids, about forty years old. He tried to find the book online to buy it and couldn’t. I liked it much I scanned it and emailed it to him. Now I had a pdf of it too, which was good.


*


John opened the email and the pdf attached. He checked the table of contents and flipped forward to the chapter “Dealing with Difficult People”. John had a couple in his life.


The book started by suggesting walking away from difficult people. A lot of times you really don’t need to deal with them. The book:


“The first line of defense against difficult people is disengagement from them. You went on a few dates with someone and find them difficult. Stop returning their calls. Walk in the other direction if you see them coming down the street.


“You don’t owe them anything. They’re a pain. If someone walked up to you and started criticizing you rudely no one would blame you for walking away from them. It’s not a different situation.


“You can disengage by physically walking away or otherwise physically disengaging with difficult people. But you can mentally disengage when the physical option isn’t on the table. That might be useful in situations you can’t physically avoid, like work or school or church.


“Having a difficult person for a boss is one tough spot. They can get you fired if they don’t like you enough. In that case you might aim for mollifying them while you look for another job.”


*


The object was the destruction of the state system and the great powers within it and the replacement of it with a utopia founded on the simple notion of the golden rule. This movement was founded by George Donaldson, an American writer.


Donaldson believed that the United States, being the greatest of powers, should be conquered from within and then used as a launch pad for the utopia. Donaldson believed, as had Lenin and Hitler, that the ends justified the means. Any method that moved the movement in the right direction was encouraged.


His first action was writing up a manifesto. In it he explained the vision and then outlined means. He thought first all golden utopians, as he called members of his nascent movement, should stop working and live off public assistance. He also recommended golden utopians have as many children as possible with each other as possible so as to demographically explode over time. He encouraged women to be pregnant as much as possible and men to not only impregnate golden utopians women but also any woman they could because those children would presumably have a greater chance of being friendly to golden Utopianism (economist Bryan caplan had argued that children of their parents are ideologically similar).


The golden utopians were also to always vote and got for the golden utopians on the ticket. All elected positions must have a golden utopians candidate running for it. If a golden utopian won he must favor a policy that moved resources towards golden utopians and away from everyone else.


All golden utopians had to give money to a political action committee run by George Donaldson that dispersed money to golden utopian candidates. All golden utopians also had to devote time to political campaigns by golden utopians regularly.


George Donaldson believed in imitating machine politics of the twentieth century towards the end of promoting golden Utopianism. Any political deals that increased the golden utopians power were acceptable. Any arrangement with other political groups that weakened golden utopian enemies without a commensurate loss of power for the golden utopians was acceptable—an enemy of my enemy is my friend, as it’s said.


The golden utopians had an active unit of detectives, all true believers, whose job was to dig up dirt on the powerful and wealthy as blackmail leverage. They also ran honeypots used to trap the powerful in compromising situations, again for leverage. The golden utopians also had lawyers, also true believers, whose job it was to defend golden utopian in legal matters. Donaldson demanded that anyone who could get s law degree should among the golden utopians. He organized an effort to bring s flood of law suits against enemies, or fat pockets for funds. The object was also for a quantity over quality of law suits to gum up the legal system and drain it of resources, further weakening the us government.


The Goldens, as they were being called, were essentially an organization designed to exploit to the hilt the weaknesses of the United States system. Armies of lawyers and politicians and functionaries used state assistance to fund their organization and produce more lawyers and politicians and functionaries, on and on.


*


The US under the generals went through a radical transformation. Boston transformed radically along with it. The skyline filled with skyscrapers. The suburbs were stuffed with more and more buildings. Cheap warehouse-like buildings were thrown up to serve immigrants moving to the US. businesses emerged to help these immigrants navigate the US.


Universities were privatized. Umass Boston became a private institution, along with the other UMass schools. Student loans were privatized.


Bostonians were typically rather liberal and do appalled by a lot of the libertarian dictates of the general to produce a stripped down night watchman state. There were protests and other agitation. The generals allowed all this since it didn’t threaten anyone’s life, liberty or property. When protests turned into rioting the generals told everyone to get inside and anyone on the streets would be arrested and thrown in jail. Tens of thousands of protestors resisted, sitting out on Boston Common. The army fenced off the common and waited for the protestors to get thirsty. They pumped in announcements stating they would allow anyone out to get water or medical services but they had to come to the perimeter where they would be triaged, then provided with water and other needs and sent to a prison camp in nearby fields.


The military treated the protestors on the common as people in rebellion and the area as a war zone subject to military justice. The principle the generals followed in this firm of justice was practical. They wanted to prevent riotous behavior and respect for their authority. They assessed an additional tax on the people who ignored the curfew that covered the cost of the military occupation and processing of the protestors ignoring the curfew and an additional tax to pay for future protests so that effectively to ignore the government orders caused the protestors to become, through their future taxes, unwilling founders of further such riot suppression. The money they were taxed went specifically into funding anti-riot efforts in the future.


The Boston common incident putca dampening on ignoring government dictates, but protesting got more intense. The generals didn’t punish that. It was the rioting and ignoring dictates from the generals regarding fighting rioting that they punished.


The next incident was if a similar large protest, that protested the military handling of the original Boston common protest. More property damage was incurred, thus time more intense and purposeful. The protesting was spread out among many locations in Boston to make it harder to suppress. Protester organizers coordinated and aimed to disperse when the authorities got there and move to another location.


The generals put another curfew on the city. Protesters ignored it and evaded the army as best as they could.


The generals declared after a few days of trying to round up protestors and rioters in the city that anyone out in the streets now would be exiled to a penal colony and all their property would go to the military anti-riot fund.


That scared off a lot of protesters and rioters but there were a hardcore who were caught and thrown out of the country to a penal colony.


The penal colonies were built on the bases overseas the US possessed. The prisoners there were enrolled in penal battalions that had to follow their commander or face military justice. A fair amount of the hardcore rioters pushed their luck in the penal battalions and were executed. Many though did what they had to to survive.


The penal battalions ended up doing the fighting in the expansionist wars. The idea behind the expansionist wars was that the us would use military force to conquer territory from illiberal regimes when opportune and liberate and administer the colonies with libertarian policies the generals had used.


The requirements the generals imposed on operations were that they had to pay for themselves. The unjust regimes and recalcitrant members of the conquered lands would have their property seized and given to the us military for securing and administering the territory.