The Grasshopper

Chapter 129

“On the other hand, Prince’s greed for increasingly greater profits,” said the Grasshopper, “which he called the organic need of the economy to constantly grow, was eating away at the Balance. It was necessary to constantly increase consumption, quarter over quarter.

“That is why they created the labor camps where they took the Non-Consumers, and carried out experiments on them, with the goal of creating a Super-Consumer, a being that would have an intensive and increasingly frequent need for new models.

“They tried to copy the sexual drive. And in time they succeeded. The problem emerged when they realized that the Super-Consumer must have that much more income to be able to afford all the new goods that they wanted, at least three times per week. They must earn a lot more, i.e. they have to work that much more.

“That is why at the camps they designed state-of-the-art maximally automated and robotized plants with excellent productivity and the minimal need for human labor. They trained the most successful specimen of the Super-Consumer to work and employed them at these plants. The calculation showed that their appetite for new models could be financially covered only if they worked sixteen hours per day at these most automated plants. And they worked.

“The next problem occurred when the Super-Consumers, having seen the first pieces of the new model on the assembly line, would jump onto the conveyor, steal the piece and run around the factory with it, already trying it on. When they would change, they would see the next piece on the line. They would again steal it and take off the piece from a minute ago, even though it was the same model. But this piece was a minute newer. And so on indefinitely.

“It turned out that the Super-Consumer was unusable, that their desired passion for consumption, which the Kaellas had finally developed, at a huge cost, prevented them from working and earning to satisfy their super-consumer needs. They shut down the labor camps and killed all the people.”

“Dreadful.”

“Nothing new, Dr. Palladino. It’s always the same, all throughout the existence of mankind. All the Kaellas and the Erivans of this world, regardless of the level of development of the civilization or its social organization, under the excuse of expanding its ideology, territory, wealth, power… they killed with impunity. Killing was always the only goal and death was the final outcome.

“It was by mere chance that these historic individuals, who we are familiar with, gained the oportunity to kill. Had they not killed, someone else would have. The problem of ordinary people was that they didn’t get the opportunity. And the problem of those that had the opportunity were the instruments. They had to use one group of people as the instrument for killing a different group of people.

“Through history the development of science and technology changed the structure of the killing instruments. In each subsequent epoch an increasingly smaller group of people were needed for killing an increasingly larger other group.

“This was labeled the increase in the number of civilian casualties. The need for subjects or followers was decreasing. The instruments were becoming more advanced and the killing was simpler.”