Chapter 3: A Meeting with Dr. Fitzhume

I had been studying the importance of having choices in life for some time now, and as a young student at the college, a little too ambitious and a little too na๏ve, I had been called in by one of the older professors in the political science department who somehow thought that my latest paper on voting behavior had some potential within the broader scope of political theory.

Political theory, quite plainly, is the science of creating different political worlds, or models, if you will, of political systems that are both practical in their application and also predictable in that they ought to follow the direction of a society’s movement. The more practical and predictable any given model of society is, the more palatable, and therefore, the more successful and attractive these models become, mainly to a group of venerable and finicky intellectuals and politicos whose job it is to pick and choose among the many theories that are out there vying for attention. While some theories argue for no government at all, other theories argue that all property rights ought to be owned and managed by a strong centralized government that dictates the daily lives of the masses. Some theories even walk the fine line between these two extremes and hope to persuade its readers that a balance is sorely needed in the perpetual shift between less government on one end and more government on the other. In fact, it is this cold civil war that has become the hallmark of our own American political system and the manner in which we are shaped by its methods of governance.

As I sat down across from this professor, Dr. Fitzhume his name, I noticed that he looked a bit more pale and sickly than when I had seen him last. The thin strands of his lightning white hair stood on end, and the deep wrinkles and creases cutting into his face had fossilized almost every facial expression he had ever used. It made me consider that he may have had mixed and varied reactions to the theories he had studied in the vast libraries of books he had read, and that lately he had been spending his twilight years pondering all he had learned over the course of his thirty-year tenure at the college.

His office was lined with books in mahogany bookcases, many of them ancient volumes, the subtle colors of the mahogany weighted down by a heavy dust that seemed to be ubiquitous and born out of the air. I could see these fine, white particles dance and wave in a single stream of light that cut through the one small window the department allotted him. He kept an old-fashioned typewriter on his desk, and his fingertips, calloused and swollen with sores, revealed the many years he had spent banging away on its stubborn, oval keys. The thudding taps of block letters on thick, flaky paper were now part of his inner world, a sound following him wherever he went.

I also noticed my latest paper of voting behavior tucked beneath the base of his green banker’s lamp. Apparently he had read my paper and was poised to impart his thoughts on it. He reclined in his leather chair, taking my paper into his bone-stricken hands and licking his fingers before peeling back each page. It seemed as though he struggled to remember what our meeting was about.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said, “you certainly are one of our more promising students. I recall your last paper that specifically stated that the choices laid at our feet are more plentiful now than ever before, is that right?”

“Yes, professor,” I said nervously.

“Well then, when I was a young, handsome scholar like yourself, I too thought that the world was full of amazing possibilities. They even gave me a few awards for proving that these possibilities existed, and while I discovered hordes of complicated equations and exotic philosophies to prove that these fantastic choices are all around us, just waiting to be plucked like apples from the devil’s tree, I’ve learned over the years that, in life, we only really have four choices to choose from.”

I chuckled at this, but apparently Dr. Fitzhume didn’t see the humor in his statement.

“In other words, you are missing the bigger picture,” he said, as his frail body arched across his desk and slid the paper back to me. “When you leave this college you will be confronted with only four choices, and these four choices represent the four types of people you will soon become. These choices are a direct consequence of this grand, antiquated, and problematic civilization of ours.”

“I don’t understand,” I said in response.

“Oh, I know you don’t, which is why I’ll explain my simple theory to you in the short time we have left together. Again, because we have four different choices, these choices are mere reflections of the four types of people who inhabit this society of ours, as great as it is and also as limited as it is. Let’s take the first choice, or more appropriately put, the first type of person you will inevitably become.”

“Okay,” I said, swallowing difficultly.

“The first choice you have is to be a strong and fiercely moral being. You take whatever knowledge you have collected from the few moral texts that your parents and your grandparents had read, and for every problem or issue our society faces, there usually is a set of very simple solutions to work with. The moral, upright being is usually the type of person who sees everything as a black and white issue, as there are very few gray areas in anything. They are also quite arrogant and abrupt, as they tend to believe that the stronger they are, when it comes to both numbers and muscle, then the greater their abilities will be to control and direct life’s unrelenting uncertainties. They have very little tolerance for others and will see only those of their own ilk as allies in their quest to dominate the spaces and materials they had once inherited from their generous forefathers, until, of course, they have no more room left on their farms and plantations and decide at their convenience to break treaties and expand, conquer, and enslave.

“The more intelligent of this type of person does most of the planning, and so they take most of the profit when they send the children of other families off to war in order to plunder whatever treasures they need. And while these profiteers convince the rest of society that such an imperialism is based on just causes, many of our citizens are so shocked and awed by their unbending will that they are usually forced to comply with whatever cruel and unusual methods they use. This, in turn, keeps the average citizen safe from the thugs these profiteers hire to defend - not the rest of society - but mainly those planners who reap the profits in the first place. And again, while some of these planners and profiteers have some glint of wit in their sparkling eyes, it’s a shame to say that those who benefit from this type of perversion will use fear and coercion to enforce their particular brand of what may or may not be their intelligent design onto the three other types of people who must either fight back against them or flee to distant shores. Whatever advances their intentions becomes the right, the good, the just, and the intelligent, as their planning almost always mimics the few books, scholarly or otherwise, that miraculously define life’s unending complexities in a few short volumes.

“And while most of them are cautious and forthright in their daily lives, they usually stick to what they know to be true while hoisting up pictures of the evil cartoon figures they want the rest of us to destroy. And while these types of persons are generally the products of the union of two carnivorous Neanderthals somewhere down their nativist line, their way of going about things are relatively harmless when compared to the underhandedness exhibited by the second type of creature I’ll discuss next. At least this first type is more direct and honest in his cannibalism, while the second type smiles at you happily before sinking his or her fangs deep into your neck.

“This second type of creature is usually raised as a spoiled brat, and in his or her younger years of intense wanting, this person is then abused in some way by the very people he or she loves. He is then unsure about how to survive or in what direction he should go. At first, the creature is lost and confused, only to dabble in many different intellectual and artistic pursuits. As he gets older, he calls this confusion “open mindedness” and thinks himself smart, highly sophisticated, or imbued with a futuristic prescience, and soon this person joins other free-spirited free-thinkers who in unison complain about and criticize anyone who doesn’t eagerly volunteer to live in the castles they have erected high in the sky. They can’t live in these castles themselves, so they’ll convince young students like yourself to live in them instead, and when they turn you insane with all of their complaining and arguing, all of their bitterness, darkness, and cynicism, all of their lofty talk directed at undermining the cruelty of the world, you then realize that their visions have no practical grounding in any reality other than their own. They then realize that those very castles they’ve built have all burned to the ground by the few Neanderthals whose duty it is to light the fuse whenever their chatter, gossip, and debauchery become too irritating to bear.