Once Upon a Time in Quirkistan

Once upon a time there was this Republic called Quirkistan. It was ruled by a hyper intelligent elite, possessors of the most shiny and reputed tokens. These tokens vested in them utmost respect and reverence, as only the most brilliant, capable, responsible, and deserving Quirkistanis were issued them. The tokens were granted with great pomp and circumstance by velour-robed Sages in solemn ceremonies, after listening to liturgy imparted by an elevated Sage in an annual ritual of initiation so full of symbolism and self-congratulation that for many, of the recipients the initiation represented the single most important day of their lives. 

How could they think otherwise? That token granted them access to the upper echelons of Quirkistan. Attaining one was akin to the assurance of a life full of opulence, comfort, and the absence of suffering. The institutions that issued them prided themselves in hand-picking their future tokenholders from the most brilliant, meritocratic pools of young candidates. Those pools were full of youngsters bred from the womb to become the elite. They had no other choice --they had won the elite lottery. They just didn't know it yet. Superior diets; supercharged self esteems (massaged 24/7 by those surrounding them growing up); world-class health care, and of course the unbreakable commitment of their parents (usually the mother) to discharge the unforgiving full-time duty to cater to their little elite lottery winner's every need. Thus, piano lesson by piano lesson, math tutor by math tutor, tennis class by tennis class, the human capital required to meet the astronomically high admission standards imposed by the institution's gatekeepers' would be built. It was a high-stake game. The mere thought of losing the elite lottery would turbocharge their race to optimize their little thoroughbred's brainpower. 

Some of those tokenholders--the ones with the shiniest and most reputed of them all-- would eventually form the spine of Quirkistan's elite. They just didn't know exactly how, or when that would come to be. The anxiety that pervaded their parent's efforts to train them om their childhood could be shed, however. They were tokenholders now. They'd made it. The mere broaching of the possession of an elite token would almost automatically open doors, persuade people, grant status, elicit envy, intimidate peers, and guarantee access to a club of equally powerful elite tokenholders who would look after the well-being of their fellow elite tokenholder by doing their darnest to elevate each other with the unwritten understanding that Quid-Pro-Quo was the pact they tacitly signed the day each of them received their sacramental token from that Sage at their initiation rite. 

Of course not every brand of token was the same. There were levels. Rankings. A coterie industry devoted to classifying each kind, hyping the right one; denigrating the wrong one. Everyone agreed the right kind was of the highest value. Parents were willing to go to jail to game the system to get the right one if there was a possibility that their little one could lose the elite lottery. The price per token (especially elite ones) skyrocketed. Some parents mortgaged the farm in the pursuit of tokens that turned to be bad ones. Possessors of elite tokens, however, sailed through the ranks of life. Many reached the highest rung of the ladder; to positions steering Quirkistan's very future. So encompassing and absolute was the power of the elite token, some of those tokenholders were not even chosen directly by Quirkistanis, but rather appointed due to their perceived acumen and competency. Quirkistanis trusted those elite tokenholders. They were enlightened, and looked for the good of Quirkistan.

But things had not been good in Quirkistan. Little more than 40 years of failed policies enacted by appointed elite tokenholders had created two kinds of Quirkistanis. The ones that participated in the optimization race to attempt a shot a tokens, and those unfortunate to have been born in environments without a chance to even aspiring to get one. The first kind had a much better chance of living well. The second kind was utterly left behind. Desperate, tokenless Quirkistanis gradually fell through the ranks, and within 2 generations most of them were poorer than their parents. Never in the history of Quirkistan had a generation not been richer than their predecessors had been. Tokenless got stuck, and they collectively fell prey to substance abuse. So dire was their malady, hat they literally started dying of despair. The ones who didn't, harbored resentment towards tokenholders, who looked down on them. Tokenholders mocked them; considered them retrograde. Primitive, even. Resentment turned into hatred.

Things went on like this for so long that tokenholders became catastrophically disconnected from the life experience of tokenless Quirkistanis. You might as well have thought this schism created two countries: Cosmopolitania and NoTokensilvania. The first hypothetical country would have encompassed Quirkistan's big metropolis; the second one, the smaller towns between big cities. 

Exacerbating the problem was the widespread adoption of a new technology that in principle was meant to bring Quirkistanis together, but in practice widened the cleaving. The technology, called Looper (a gadget billed as a way to keep friends, family and potentially everyone "in the loop" about the happenings in your life) was touted as the great connector. Its inventor, an elite tokenholder himself, wrapped the gadget in the wholesome idea of allowing Quirkistanis to reconnect with old friends and distant family members for free, with the added bonus of allowing every gadget user the freedom to say anything on the gadget with no repercussions at all. But as the smart elite tokenholder that he was, Looper's inventor kept control of whom to show every gadget user's proclamations, manipulating their interactions; trafficking with their attention. 

And so, after a very long time of coexistence under same country, but without really having to face each other up close, Looper linked tokenless and tokenholders. 

And Looper made their disgust for each other explode.

Their worldview was so disconnected, each side never even bothered trying to understand each other. Each one thought Quirkistan was in danger of collapsing as a country if the way of life of the opposite side was allowed to become the dominant one. Tokenless thought of tokenholders as traitors that hated their own country. Tokenholders thought tokenless hatred towards anyone different from them was morally repugnant. Tokenless thought tokenholders' judgment of their supposed moral shortcomings was condescending. Tokenholders thought of tokenless as rubes who embarrassed them in the eyes of the international world. 

Quirkistan's a weird country. While Quirkistanis of all backgrounds fanatically claim their country's unique because it's "democratic and free", they do not elect their leaders by popular vote. "One person one vote" does not apply in Quirkistan as it does all around the world. Citizens' votes in key, massively populated provinces get systematically diluted, while votes cast in sparsely populated rural provinces have their votes outweigh the former by 2x. One party (the one claiming tokenless in its ranks) is known to block citizens from voting. But since this is perfectly legal, nobody does anything serious to stop it, and everyone accepts it. The result is that the party aligned with the tokenless has won the popular vote exactly once in the last 30 years, but has been in power 15 of those 30. That party could lose an election by a margin of 5% of the popular vote, and still win the election. Stuff like this would be the trigger of revolutions in other countries, but not in Quirkistan. Everyone knows about this "quirk". It's just a fact of life.  

Every election cycle tokenless and tokenholders, squarely aligned in opposing parties, bickered and argued their different views of the country, as well as the merits of their respective solutions to Quirkistan's issues. The bickering and arguing abated after every election. They were all Quirkistanis first, after all. But then the gradual deterioration of the tokenless malaise made them prey to populist voices, so prone to take advantage of the collective pain. One voice in particular captured the imagination of the tokenless. After decades of feeling talked down to, made fun of, and losing economic opportunities, they were galvanized by a populist leader who promised to crush the tokenholder elite from the outside. He himself was an elite tokenholder (a fact he even touted heavily) but the irony of this was not captured by the angry tokenless. The harangue was to destroy the elite that had maligned them so much; that which had arrogantly imposed the failed policies that precipitated their economic collapse; the one that created the conditions of their despair; the one that humiliated them and thought of them as less Quirkistani. But most importantly: to prevent tokenholders and their view to destroy their beloved Quirkistan. The harangue worked. Whipping up the passion of feeling heard for the first time, the populist leader rode the anger (in many cases hatred) of the tokenless, and, aided by the paid manipulation tools of Looper, won the presidency in an upset that shocked observers. Revenge tasted sweet for the tokenless. 

For reëlection (yes, Quirkistan allows it, and yes, I used diaeresis there) the Quirkistani president went full overdrive. His only electoral strategy had always been whipping up anger in his tokenless supporters; there was no way he'd change tack --it was his brand, after all. Before becoming a politician, he had cultivated a persona of success, which he had profited from handsomely in his past business life, defrauding suppliers, partners, customers, and cheating the fiscal authorities by abusing tax laws. If he'd learned something in life, is that no matter what you did or what happened to you, you had to fake it 'til you made it. There would always be someone willing to buy your brand, even if there was nothing there to back it up. And almost as crucial: that if you repeated a lie enough times, it magically became true at some level, since everyone was forced to amplify it in order to dispel it. A master reader of the spirits griping the country, he leaned on inciting fear for his reëlection campaign. 

"Tokenholders will steal the election." 

"They'll destroy the country." 

"They will make anything possible to remove all your God-given rights." 

"Your country as you know it will disappear if you don't do anything about it." 

"You will not have a country if the Tokenholder candidate wins this election."

"This election is existential."

His supporters fears boiled over. They went unhinged. The most ardent ones prepared for armed revolution. Thousands fantasized about it on Looper. They were absolutely convinced the candidate aligned with the Tokenholder party would destroy their country. In their raging delirium, they didn't notice the Tokenholder candidate was in fact not a "threat to the Republic", but a mediocre career politician who belonged in the political center, who had never advocated for any truly bold policy himself, who had failed twice in prior attempts to become presidential candidate, and whose biggest "threat" was that he was a fundamentally decent, empathic, normal family man whose life was marked by tragic human losses in his immediate family. Heck, he, the tokenholder candidate, didn't even have the right kind of token --unlike the populist, who carried his elite token as a badge of honor anywhere he went. It didn't matter. The rabid tokenless believed they were the moral descendants of the brave, quasi-mythical revolutionaries who 250 years earlier had liberated Quirkistan from the tyrannical yoke of the Oppressian Empire. And they were determined to emulate them. It didn't help that Looper amplified rumors saying the Tokenholder candidate suffered from brain hijacking and was remotely manipulated from a mainframe computer powered by solar panels located in the dark side of the moon, and that part of the computer's AI plan was to dismember any Christian baby younger than 18 months old, and that a secret cabal of devil worshipers was bankrolling the tokenholder campaign with the ultimate objective of committing genocide of anything and anyone who would not abide by their Godless, orgy-prone values.

And it was in this explosive context that it happened. The tokenholder candidate motorcade, en route to a campaign event, was ambushed by a paramilitary group in a sparsely populated highway stretch. Their gun stockpiling was finally put to use. In their minds, they were genuinely doing Quirkistan a service. Their future was existentially threatened, they felt. The populist had said so. It was all clear. Looper confirmed their view. They had to act. The tokenholder candidate was assassinated. 

Quirkistan fell in disarray. The establishment rocked to its core. Centuries of peaceful transfers of power at the verge of being interrupted by a terrorist act at the height of the most polarizing election everyone had memory of. The rage felt by the small segment of the populist candidate's supporters morphed into full-blown national panic. Quirkistan, a Republic where there's one weapon for every inhabitant, was careening towards civil war. 

The tokenholder party scrambled and immediately called for peace, in the middle of a massive national mourning. The populist candidate grudgingly called for peace as well. 5 days were left before the election, but the election would still go on. In a hasty ceremony, broadcasted on multiple media, the tokenholder party swore and nominated the vicepresidential candidate, an equally mainstream woman with great charisma and slightly bolder political career, as presidential candidate for the tokenholder party.

Quirkistan was forced to look at herself in the mirror. The assassination of the former candidate brought to stark relief what great president he would have made. Someone with the moral authority to call the Quirkistan back to normality. A normality where Quirkistanis are Quirkistanis first, and members of certain party second. A healer trying to undo the damage the populist was purposefully doing. He had retired from politics after decades of service, thinking he had done enough, perhaps intuiting he'd accomplish little else given his advanced age --he was about to enter his 80s. But when the populist showed in his first term disturbing inclinations for totalitarianism, and an unbridled willingness to incite hatred in his pursuit of power, he deemed necessary to act. He was mocked for his age during the campaign; his mental acuity questioned, but he still persevered. He had lost his wife and daughter in a horrific car accident. He'd lost his brilliant and promising son (a decorated war hero and accomplished and successful lawyer) to cancer decades afterward. He'd suffered as a family member the consequences of substance abuse by his other son (the very affliction suffered by millions of tokenless!) He'd been through a lot. And yet, he still felt the duty to come back from retirement in his late 70s to bring the country back from the brink.  

Alas. It was not meant to be for him. 

But something happened after his assassination. Quirkistan's shock turned into introspection. Facing the monster of civil war up close triggered something in the population. The relative prosperity and peace that Quirkistanis had enjoyed for centuries, albeit not equally distributed, was something worth keeping after all, the country reckoned. It was either that or mutual annihilation. The new tokenholder candidate represented a viable alternative for a way back. And the shock of seeing the assassinated candidate for who he truly was (a fundamentally decent, good human being) finally broke the spell the populist held on a significant portion of the population. Not everyone was convinced, of course, but the thought of societal collapse was too much of a price to pay to avoid 4 years of a policy agenda unaligned with their beliefs. The sheer threat of self-destruction turned the red light on. 

On the day of election, Quirkistanis lined up for vote in numbers that historians had never seen before. More than one candidate or the other, they were voting for the future of the Republic. And against its collapse.

And in a landslide, they overwhelmingly voted to go back to normality.

Fin.