Would the gratuitously wealthy and very corrupt, morally and otherwise, only progressively respond to some form of irresistibly forced ‘Only If It’s In My Backyard’ scenario (a slightly altered, usually politically-charged ‘Not In My Back Yard’, or NIMBY), in the sense that they’d fiscally and/or morally act in a truly constructive manner? Or could human nature, individual or collective, somehow manage to on its own compel the rich and corrupt to finally do the humane thing—i.e. what’s best for all of humankind—on their own accord and not have to be forced to do so in the most obtrusive way by, for example, divine will, a scenario portrayed in the case of the following idealist fictional account?

___________________________


“Empath, noun: (chiefly in science fiction) a person with the paranormal ability to apprehend the mental or emotional state of another individual.”
—The New Oxford Dictionary of English


ON January 1st, 2000, everyone on Earth awoke to a suddenly far superior existence than just hours before, indeed a Great Change. It was, and would always remain so, the most profound change ever; one that favoured the materially, physically, mentally and spiritually poorest people everywhere.

All healthy and wealthy people of the world, the fortunate large majority, inexplicably—though it actually occurred by way of divine simulation—experienced the bitter ailments and enormous wants plaguing their fellow human and four-legged beings. Not at all surprising, it was only through such involuntary telepath-like empathy experienced by the fortunate that utmost efforts were made by them to ensure as-pleasant-as-possible lives for literally all of those unfortunate souls.

The first spectacular alteration well-noticed in the Great Change was that, henceforth, all men were forced to equally share in, to literally experience the exact same excruciating pain caused by the contractions and orifice expansions suffered by the labouring mother of his offspring. It didn’t matter where on Earth the impregnating male happened to be, he truly suffered the very same significant pain experienced by his mate. Even for each decent man who was fully present during his mate’s entire turbulent gestation-period experience—he who had from Day One of the pregnancy, which he’d sincerely celebrated throughout, stood by her physically (when possible) and/or emotionally from beginning to end of each child-bearing day—that impregnating man no longer got away with just sympathy pains, however well intentioned, but rather he also shared in thus endured the entire enormous pregnancy and delivery turmoil, as well as the hormone-related often debilitating depression likely suffered by the new mother during the immediate weeks or months to follow the birth of the child. Instead the would’ve-been sympathy pains became factually practical, totally meaningful genuine empathy pains that were truly burden-bearing experiences for both the impregnating father (though for him in a ‘negative’ sense) and his greatly pregnant or strenuously labouring mate (though for her in a ‘positive’ direction). Thus in totality such childbearing women needed not spine-injected pain killers, etcetera, as the child’s biological father bore precisely half of the whole brunt; yet, ironically, he eventually would come around to find it all to have been a rewarding, exhilarating experience of his lifetime.

Other spectacular alterations also became increasingly well-noticed in the Great Change. Henceforth, any hunger pains endured by some were unavoidably universally felt by all; thus the well-fed were irresistibly compelled to do their very best at alleviating hunger in its global totality. In return, those who had suffered prolonged starvation awoke to an exceptionally strong sense of relief from the persistent unquenched pains. Uniquely amazing, the great relief was felt long before the arrival of food-aid shipments anxiously sent mostly by fully developed countries—food gratefully given because the planet’s privileged were abruptly feeling what had consumed the very hungry for so very long. And in return for that purest of empathy expressed through both mind and practise, by feeding while feeling all Earthly hunger, the fortunate folks’ own starvation cramps—all of which came to be recognized more as some form of sympathy pains—were themselves alleviated.

Then, again unprecedentedly profound, every fortunate person who’d never been tormented in such a grievous manner instantly began empathically equally sharing in the anguish suffered because of the greatest personal loss that fate seemed to apathetically reserve for those few so extremely unlucky—that of a parent who’d lost a child to torture and murder. In rehabilitative return, those unfortunate parents who’d suffered the unjust extreme loss and cruel crime felt so very great a relief of their affliction, since every fortunate person on the planet also bore a tiny portion of that emotional turmoil in its collective entirety. In the Great Change scheme of things, when all members of ‘the world community’ genuinely empathically shared in such terrible loss, it was to be a literal sharing of grief, just as though each and every person was each and every child victim’s parent.

In further such divine intervention, every person who’d intentionally caused suffering, justly yet involuntarily sustained the more intensely bitter side of truly empathic justice. If one had shot another person, he then experienced the same excruciating pain and terror suffered by his victim. If one gratuitously harmed a harmless stray animal—a neighbour’s benign beloved pet being the example divinely considered, (non-human) animals being intellectually incapable of malicious acts simply for the sake of malice—the offender thus experienced both that animal’s suffering as well as its owner’s emotional anguish.

Regardless of how minor the bad deed, the perpetrator was always left experiencing, through divine simulation, the precisely same resultant physical and mental turmoil. Furthermore it quickly became realized by all that, even without the unfortunates’ and victims’ awareness of the unexplainable sudden Great Change, their cause was still equally endured in due fairness by all fortunate persons and perpetrators. Indeed, soon put into newsprint was the old-school journalistic mission statement: the comfortable were being empathically afflicted, while the afflicted were contrarily comforted through similarly empathic means.

The figurative thesis statement of the genuinely just function of the Great Change was rather analogous to a fiscally imprudent national government squandering a large sum of the public treasury. With the impact of the monetary shortfall shouldered equally via a negligible tax increase placed upon every service-recipient citizen, each endured but a miniscule portion of the collective monetary damage.

There was also beauty within the vast newness expressed through excessive wealth, albeit under the vast weight of overwhelming divine compulsion, being fully distributed to the countless in most need. In great return, the newly-forced-into-philanthropy were alleviated of the clinical depression that typically accompanied their unquenched thirst for progressive purpose in their lives to replace the melancholy manufacturing meaninglessness of faithfully reading The Wall Street Journal.

What amazed everyone in every nation by noon that New Year’s Day was the unanimous hundred percent effort made by the planet’s fortunate residents to significantly better the lives of their fellow though unfortunate human and four-legged beings.

Amongst the few seriously dreading the Great Change the very most, not in the least surprising, were the bigwig CEOs at the insidious helm of the giant tobacco industry. There was no denying that their PR reps and senior henchmen knowingly caught and firmly maintained within their deceitful web for many lucrative decades billions of addicted people who abused the vicious health-hazard product thus severely sickening before prematurely dying.
The said offenders awoke to specifically feel what it was like to incessantly worry over their loved-ones’ inevitable future financial difficulties due to their debilitating smoking-related illness or death. They suffered the same continuous anxiety suffered by their countless smoking patrons, though particularly those not covered by any adequate medical insurance or sufficient savings to ensure their families the necessities of life.

Then, the same offending moral-fibre-bottom-feeders experienced a divinely-induced simulation of the stunning stinging sensation frighteningly felt by a chronic smoker whose collapsing lungs are undergoing serious blood-vessel breaches. The tobacco product profiteers coughed uncontrollably until imminently releasing globs of blood into the sink. Yet, although they were in fact experiencing the physical sensations and visual effects caused by their own menacingly toxin-laden creation that’s promptly promoted worldwide, the divine act of the Great Change nonetheless spared them from the actual physical damage that would’ve been so poetically justified.

Again very profound events occurred, involving elected and appointed officials who had knowingly allowed lifelong crippling diseases to infect large quantities of banked emergency blood supplies. Of course, collective humankind being what it was, the inexcusably inhumane crime was committed for the single-minded immoral purpose of increased ill-gotten personal-profit and government-coffer loot. But the guilty were all individually made to make significant empathic amends, especially as they had permitted sickness and death to prolifically spread by way of their personally-convenient silence. The perpetrators awoke in terrified bewilderment to mandatorily suffer the same horrendous consequences that they’d caused multitudes of young and old alike to needlessly suffer by way of Hepatitis C and HIV. All perpetrators experienced “a bleed,” during which blood accumulated in the stomach until the pressure increased sufficiently to have the blood horrifically burst the wall of the esophagus. Exactly as would many Hep-C victims, those responsible for the disease infection and rampage within the blood supply literally felt the life flow out of them as they regurgitated their own blood, just prior to complete liver failure.

Henceforth, the offenders were unavoidably self-compelled to devote the remainder of their lives alleviating their own simulated symptoms of the deadly blood illnesses they had allowed to flourish. And yet again in return was the immense relief of the actual illness and symptoms excessively suffered by those innocents unjustly infected because of the monetary and political gain by others so poetically brought to bear for their great misdeeds.

Furthermore, through divine inducement did all other diseases immediately become broadly acknowledged; thus, medical research into them, to procure both treatments and cures, increased exponentially through exponentially greater funding to the point of surplus monies, almost entirely by multi-national corporations.

Dominantly flanking that just cause, the few yet overly-privileged pharmaceutical industry insiders—until New Year’s Day, 2000, their freshest fruits monetarily inaccessible to the virtual totality of Earth’s large majority impoverished populace—empathically endured that suffered by the countless unduly unfortunate folk unable to afford the extremely expensive medication. What else could the empathically penancing over-privileged mass-pill-peddlers at all do but to make the greatest possible effort to ensure that no person, regardless of wealth and Earthly location, was ever again left wanting of equal access to top-quality medical treatment.

Also highlighting the first day of the rest of humanity, the mass beneficiaries of superfluously profitable gargantuan corporations began to truly feel the debilitating anxiety and hopelessness suffered by the plenitude of employees they’d fired. They were fired people heavily reliant on their jobs in order to provide food and shelter for their families but left destitute due to “down-sizing” for the sole soulless goal of enabling even greater financial-beneficiary yields for all corporate insiders. Irresistibly complying with their inexplicable compulsions to halt all needless terminations of employment regardless of the negligible negative effect upon their grand profit margins, the corporate mass beneficiaries discovered that the unpleasant ‘sympathy anxiety’ they were suffering was quickly alleviated simply by their miniscule fiscal sacrifice for the sole yet far superior sake of their employees and relevant loved-ones.

Furthermore, the same overly privileged business tycoons residing easily in their extravagant mansions while feasting on figurative or literal truffles and caviar, also empathically endured the same great angst suffered by the forlorn massive-majority poor typically languishing throughout the undeveloped world. The overly-privileged had long retained the shamefully shabby employment of the deteriorating poor for but pennies per hour, with so very many withering away under the worst of working conditions, often for eighteen-hour days.

But out from such inhumanity poured profound moral freshness solely because of the Great Change, gratefully offered and generously accepted was the sudden yet long overdue many-fold increase in wages paid and quality of working conditions.

The corporate masters then went even further by hastily insisting upon such wearily impoverished laborers’ lives in every aspect becoming generally aligned with those enjoyed by laborers throughout the developed world. Meanwhile, average workers in the developed world were themselves straightaway brought up to par with their far more generously salaried fellow labourers and countrymen. Most significant in the demonstratively vast newness in universal labour practises was that, because of their extensively improved wages, working conditions and therefor much healthier lives, the said undeveloped-world labourers were finally enabled—with full credit going to their employers’ ‘sympathy symptoms’ or divinely enforced empathy—to relish their weekends, away from work, to freely spend them with their loved-ones or even with their own untroubled thoughts.

Yet in primary profound intent was the Great Change so aptly defined, as all persons directly or indirectly responsible for mass-scale torture and murder were those at the highest peak in the order of the lowest moral fibre to be found anywhere on Earth, and for their vilest of misdeeds they were henceforth foremost empathically forced to justly correct and compensate.

Having so abundantly utilized the mightiest armament to cause incalculably prolific suffering, weapons so readily peddled to them by powerful nations’ worst human beings—the latter being vastly armed yet minimally self-allotted humane responsibility thus to suffer uniquely great empathy—various tyrants of so many war-torn territories found their divinely-induced ‘sympathy pains’ of the utmost unbearable kind. As they quickly realized, any forthcoming relief would, first of all, have to be preceded by the total relinquishment of their blood-stained loot to their surviving victims and families of such. Secondly, though of greatest importance, the relatively meagre material recompense would itself have to be immediately followed by such greatest of offenders, without any exception, devoting the remainder of their waken lives toward naught but doing their utmost to alleviate suffering they’d brought upon the multitudes.

Although they could never, even in multiple lifetimes, even come close to empathically experiencing all of the needless anguish they’d so cruelly caused, they nevertheless were ultimately even greatly gratified to just be permitted to lead their remaining days in that precise penancing direction. To spare their victims some suffering—to genuinely sympathetically endure the simulated agony for which they were responsible—was all that they’d ever again passionately crave. Henceforth were the worst of Earthly perpetrators so sincerely grateful for their opportunity to perform a penance so perfectly befitting that any of their own empathic suffering or sympathetic pain alleviated in return was for them purely charitable divine icing on an already rich cake.

From that January 1st of the new millennium, the very first day of the Great Change, not one single person would receive any satisfaction whatsoever from another’s misfortune. Quite the contrary, in fact: Since sensitivity was divinely ruling the day, fortunate people soon began experiencing exactly that afflicting unfortunate people—regardless of the fortunate folks not even being at any fault.

In the process of so fully sensing and acknowledging others’ plights, fortunate people actually imminently became insufferably weary of others experiencing any burdensome health or event in the first place—great weariness felt because of pure sympathy, following the brief period of feeling such for but self-serving personal relief in exchange. No longer did one person enjoy comfort and pleasure while another agonized over sadness and misery. All pleasure and pain were shared or, in another sense, balanced out equally across the planet.


Frank G Sterle Jr