Once their was a little boy who was preferred, by his parents over his sister. Very conventionally was he preferred and without any particular reason other than the usual — because he was a boy — and because he wanted to be special.
When his sister cried, she was comforted. When he cried, he got a new toy.
Once when she fell down, and ran crying to her mother, he told his parents, “She was trying to run too fast.” It worked. They told her to quit running so fast. He told her too.
Once when she got an award at school, he told all his friends that he had taught her what she needed to win the award. They said, “You are the one who should have gotten the award.” His parents too praised him for teaching his sister so much.
But despite all this training, his sister didn’t turn out so well, and she brought a a bit of shame to the family, on account of some unrighteousness, which he noticed, and he stood up against it, much to the approval of his parents, and he took some lessons from all this, and he put them in his heart.
Off he went to college, and after college, continuing to think hard, he went for advanced religious training.
He got it, the training, in righteousness, and it confirmed what he had always thought, and soon after graduating, he was able to find a group who would take him on and in and over them too, and that sort of thing — the agreement about who was who, and what was what, and what could be done, and what everyone knew shouldn’t be done, and so he formalized the thing-within-the-whole-of-the-hierarchical-thing and he set up shop as a righteous man.
Thus and such and so — sock and sacred smock — he went at his life’s work, training the unrighteous in the ways of God. He was very, very warm, with everyone, for the moment of the talk and the hand-shake after, the pre-compliment, the mid-compliment and the post-compliment, and they felt that he taught them well, and they began, in short order, to prefer him.
He felt as if he had come home.
Things went well, for awhile, until another leaders rose up and began to gain honor in the group. This made the first leader very angry.
“They are running too fast!” he told some influential members of the group. “I told them not to do that,” he went on, “and you need to help me sort them out. They are not submitting as they should,” he concluded, and he got very worked up about it and held some secret meetings, and threatened to quit if the problem-makers were not put in their places.
This worked very effectively and before you know it, the offending leaders were demoted by those who were assigned to protect the protection of the protected. It was all done very obliquely and quietly with some frank and rank and piddly spank, and then the chosen leader calmed down and was able to be nice again.
That got him to thinking again, and before you know it, he began to begin to become increasingly convinced, and furthermore and such-a-thought — a bit more this way and not that, as prescribed in a book he read but never quoted, super-slowly and ultra-slyly, with more than a dose of hyper-attentive personal affection and a growing truck load of outwardly trending disgust — that he was alone was chosen to be inflamed and to lead the charge against the overly unrighteous.
“All the sub-ones,” he began to insist and I quote, “must submit to the divine one, and all the lesser-ones must submit to the preferred one, and all the sub-performers must submit to the main performers. and all the sub-genders must submit to the main-genders, and all the sub-righteous must submit to the very righteous.”
And as for those who were the very unrighteous, what was to be done with them?
He became increasingly convinced, that the righteous ones must go out to them, and enter their homes, with words and pictures, and convince them that they were wrong, and that if they didn’t change they would remain poor and sick and powerless, and that they would be hated by the righteous one, and lost forever, and that they would deserved to be afflicted with eternal pain and punishment and even death.
This worked. It really worked. Money flowed in to his group, and his followers flowed out to convince the world of unrighteousness.
The group multiplied, and the leader became very wealthy, the proper gain and harvest and blessing from all his good choices and hard work. He built a huge worship palace, and it was filled. He built a massive compound for himself, with a beautiful home in the center for his family, and a helicopter pad, and gyms and swimming pools and waterslides and tennis courts and climbing walls and a performing arts center, and special guests and supporters and other powerful people, ones who ruled, were invited there.
The group became very popular, and their leader too, and they knew that it centered on the fact that they were very clear about who they were against, and who they were for, and who was to be preferred, and who was not.
And the leader of this group lived a long life, full of righteousness, and he was honored greatly upon every occasion of the group, and by other groups, — although not by the unrighteous — and when he died, the group went to great lengths to make their next decision.
They worked very hard, and scoured the earth, they looked into families and they peered into the schools, just so that they might discover the right man, trained by his parents and teachers, to be the next one to train the world in righteousness. And they found him, and he had been well-trained, and he came to them, and immediately he could see that they had been very well-trained, and he was very satisfied when they began to prefer him.
And he rose up, and took his place, as the head of the group, and like the one before him, he trained the world in righteousness.
Modern Fables and Antifables 