Neo-Fascist Romeo

Near the end of the 20th century, it was said that one out of every twenty people was a sociopath; that is, 5% of American’s experienced no guilt. When the statistic first came out, people were appalled.

Emoticyn was supposed to help us fight those kinds of evils; to cure all of us of our emotional ills. In the clinical trials it successfully inhibited the emotions of its users, completely suppressing greed and hate and rage and any number of other ills that had molded our society into the cesspool of contempt and self-indulgence that it had become.

When it was released to the public – and mandated by the government – it weeded out everything that made society wicked. We had no more hatred, no more war, no more racism, and no more covetousness. It also had the clever side effect of subduing lust, so we only had sex as a means of civic responsibility to propagate the species. This added the convenient by-product of population control. For a while the government was quite satisfied with the neat little orderly society it had created with its proportions exacted precisely to facilitate economic and societal growth.

What they didn’t count on, though, was the inevitable adaptation factor. Without emotion we had no guilt. Once guilt was gone anything was possible. People lied and stole and cheated as it suited their needs. If we could logically convince ourselves we needed something we took it. If it seemed like it would better our situation we lied about it. No guilt, so no big deal. But the worst part was when we started killing people for whatever reason suited us and no one cared enough to mourn the dead.

After too many years of apathy and too much of what we were trying to weed out working its way back in – and now seeming right to us all – the government changed its stance from requiring it to prohibiting it. But they weren’t smart enough to wean us off slowly. They took it away over night. For over a year our country was steeped in a chaos unknown since humans have ruled the earth. The withdrawal for most was unbearable and many took their own lives. For those that remained, it was a lesson that anarchy isn’t as cool as the t-shirts had fooled us into believing. It was the year they called the Rage War, for reasons that were obvious to anyone who lived through it.

But that was more than a decade ago and we’ve been rebuilding and most of us are okay now. Ironically, no one was surprised when over 20% of the population was classified as sociopaths.

I was pretty sure after the war ended that I’d be able to get back to a normal life, but that never happened. I had been a marketing analyst before it all started, but the guiltless overthrow of truth and justice had overturned any semblance of business we’d known before. People still hated a lot of things that were bastardized by the loss of emotional discernment. Advertising was one of them.

So now I work as a dishwasher at a hotel in Vegas. I came out here after losing my job in New York. I’d banked about 2.4 million in the upsurge of marketing campaigns when everyone decided it was okay to promise people whatever they needed to hear to make them buy the product in question. If I’m good at anything it’s making up ridiculous fabrications of the truth and proving to people they’re right. Not many of us could do that convincingly postmed. So when the general public lost faith in business because all businesses were liars and cheats, I headed out here to triple my millions. The rest of the story is probably pretty obvious from my current occupational disposition.

My main interest in the war being over was that there were so many tedious little ends that needed to be tied up. People were still too unruly for my tastes; still are, if you wanna know the truth about it. I wanted the law to step in and reaffirm the rules that had once made this country great. Before Emotinicycin, we knew what was expected of us and just how much we could get away with without being put to death. Now, half the time, when I park my car in a public place for more than an hour, I come back and someone’s taken half my stuff. I hate having to deal with that crap every day. I guess I’ve sort of implemented my own social rules, in a way. If someone takes something that’s mine and I catch them, they’d better be ready to face the judge, jury and executioner, because I won’t stand for that kind of stuff. Like I said, anarchy is really only fun for the guys making money on the t-shirts; which, by the way, no one thinks is cute anymore.