More longer friend see that sky?

“So what you are proposing is…?”

“Yes, that’s right. Free healthcare for everyone, no fuss, just go to the doctor and get it. No ifs, no buts, no pre-existing conditions, virtually no paperwork. Clean and simple”

“Isn’t this rather controversial, though?”

“There is no point beating around the bush, so we will just come out and say it. Yes, we are literal demons, whose main interaction with the moral realm is the possession of mortal bodies for the purposes of evil and/or chaos. Everyone knows this, so there is no reason to pretend otherwise”

“So, why this sudden unexpected proposal?”

“See, here’s the thing. When you are possessing a body, you get to feel everything it feels. It’s part of what makes a possession a possession. If it was only a matter of getting people to do what you want, it would be more akin to rhetoric, and for that we can simply outsource the process to other humans. No, when you possess someone you go all in, and get to experience every bruise, ache, forgotten sudden pain when walking in the wrong way, and so on and so on. Humans, as they grow older, also grow accustomed to an ever expanding repertoire of subtle pains. Jumping into it unawares, to put it simply, hurts”

“So the free healthcare…?”

“It is basically a workplace health and safety issue. By improving the general levels of health among the human population at large, we reduce the risk of suddenly possessing someone with preventable arthritis or broken bones that didn’t set right or whatever other ache people nurture over the years. Prevention is better than cure, especially if the cure is painful to undergo”

“But aren’t you worried that no one will show up to your clinics, given the risk that you will possess them?”

“There are two answers to this question. First, there are more of you than there are of us, so even if we wanted to we could not possess everyone. It’s like cars: some crash, most don’t. Second, hospitals are scary as hell, if you’ll pardon the pun. They are the least natural, most sterile environments in existence, and the possession ritual simply does not work there. You have to effort it, of course – simply calling somewhere a hospital won’t cut it – but if you bring the facility up to a certain scale, the magic simply fizzles out. It’s all germs and stethoscopes and science all the way down. Frankly, we scare our demon children by threatening to send them to these places”

“So this whole thing is actually motivated by rational, ruthless self interest?”

“Well, we are demons, after all. It just turns out that sometimes you have to think one step further to get what you want”

Honored Sir

Over the last few months, we have received a considerable number of letters signed by you. While we are honored by the attention you have bestowed us and our activities, we are also ever so slightly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of correspondence. Responding to each and every letter on its own merits would require a substantial diversion of energy and effort, and so we have condensed the spirit of your overall messaging into a lean and efficient algorithm.

Seeing as it must take up a considerable amount of your time to compose these letters, we have no doubt that it will come as a relief to you that your input has been implemented in this lean and efficient manner. We look forward to seeing what marvelous projects you will embark on using your substantially increased cognitive surplus.

Sincerely,

The department of humanities

PS

What follows is the algorithm in its entirety, for your perusal:

10 PRINT “The humanities are bad, STEM is good”

20 GOTO 10

Since we have recently been asked about this a number of times from very different groups of people, it seems prudent to add an answer to this FAQ. The question in question is:

Why are your secret teachings – the most secret of all secret texts – for sale on Amazon and other online places of commerce?

There are many reasons for this, but the two most important reasons are logistics and the nature of epistemology in modern society. The logistical angle is quite straightforward. Passing secret texts around in secluded secrecy is quite time consuming and labor intensive, and some of our chapters found that they did little else than to find ways and means to discreetly transport things back and forth. Meanwhile, Amazon and those other stores already send packages to just about everywhere, so someone receiving yet another package is basically as mundane and ordinary as it ever could be. Basically, it means less work for us, with a slightly higher rate of anonymity for our members.

As to the nature of epistemology in modern society, it basically comes down to two things: no one believes anything anymore, and there is so much of everything that even those who believe don’t know what to believe in particular. As we learned in the early days of our movement, shouting out the revealed truth in the streets did not open the eyes and hearts of those who listened. Rather, they were quite annoyed by the whole ordeal, and wished to avoid further contact. The same principle also applies on a larger scale: the safest way to get someone to ignore what you have to say is to communicate it straightforwardly in a direct fashion. To outsiders, our teachings seem like so much mumbo-jumbo they’ve seen elsewhere, and they just can’t be bothered to care about it. Therefore, putting our teachings out there available for anyone to peruse ironically means that no one will actually make the effort to do so. Our secrets will, for all intents and purposes, remain secret.

There are other reasons, but they all more or less come back to these two main points. We hope that you are, if only ever so slightly, more enlightened by this answer.

He had a problem. Or, rather, something more akin to a nuisance. His job was to oversee the logistics of moving stuff to and fro, and a non-trivial amount of this moving happened by means of containers. Most of these containers were full, but some were not. Some were definitely not full, and incurred the administrative fee levied on containers containing less than a certain amount of stuff.

His first solution was to encourage the marketing people to up their marketing efforts. More stuff in motion meant more stuff to cram into those not-quite full containers, after all. After an unfortunate series of misunderstandings, he and the marketing folks reached a mutual understanding that there would never be a need to talk about anything at all ever again.

His second solution was more indirect. Instead of moving more of the company’s stuff, he arranged to move other people’s stuff. Specifically, he would pay them to fill the available container space where there was a risk of incurring the dreaded (and outrageously disproportionate) administrative fee. This would incur a non-zero cost, to be sure, but it would be substantially less than the fee, so the result would overall be a net positive.

To his surprise, and to the dismay of the marketing people, this turned out to be a widely popular service. Customers showed up left and right to move single items that otherwise would cost a small fortune to ship. For some thirty-odd months or so, he was the only logistical administrator to not incur a single fee, and was suitably commended for it. Profits were made, and everyone involved (except the marketing folks) liked the status quo.

Then, disaster struck.

Due to a glitch in the system, he ended up with an empty container. Due to it being a particularly busy day, he did not have time to look too closely at what cargo the company was shipping. His eyes were fully focused on the quota needed to avoid the fee, and boy did he avoid that fee. In a fit of administrative and logistical prowess never seen before or since, he managed to fill the whole container with miscellanea, and have everyone paid as per usual.

The company was not pleased at finding that it had paid twice to ship an entire container of other people’s stuff for no reason or profit whatsoever.

To the untrained eye, the graffiti tags were just visual noise. They appeared, disappeared, reappeared, ever changing, in what seemed to be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole between tagsters and property owners. For reasons unknown, the tags would keep popping up and disappearing; most people neither noticed nor cared.

For the trained eye, however, these tags told a different story. They told the current preferred locations of illicit trades, mostly in small contraband, easily hidden and easily exchanged between two persons in motion. One week, the tags indicated a particular street corner. Another week, they indicated an abandoned warehouse. Those who could read the signs knew where to go. Those who could not were none the wiser.

In particularly troubled times, the tags indicated a moving target. Being in any one spot for an extended period of time is risky, and necessity being the mother of invention, they invented. It was a difficult tag to make in a hurry, but it could be done: indicating that those interested were to hop on this particular bus at this particular stop at this particular time.

This went on for an untold number of years, out of mind – but not out of sight – of the general population. An anonymous society of secret transactions, unincorporated, but definitely leaving its marks.