So, today Camera Girl asked me whether I had figured out the plot for my sequel to “The Sniper.” I had to confess that my efforts to outline the story had so far been pretty feeble. And this has a lot to do with work and the annoying responsibilities it entails. But I have been thinking of late about a plot line having to do with a very, very wealthy and powerful character (Connors) trying to change drastically the way that Americans live.
And this ties in with the current state of affairs in these United States. It’s apparent that people on the Left and the Right are turning to populist leaders and movements because the American dream doesn’t seem to be working very well lately. Of course, the two sides of the political “binary” would attack the problem in completely different ways. The Mamdani wing would confiscate all wealth and “redistribute” it in a way that would turn the United States into Cuba or worse. But even the Right hasn’t managed to turn America into a capitalist wonderland. Trump has made some moves to try and reverse the off-shoring of American industrial jobs but so far, the results have not been robust in my opinion.
So, I look at this situation and I think that this may be the challenge of our age. And suppose the political parties aren’t up to the challenge. And what if the corporations aren’t interested in being part of the solution. If I want to get dystopian, I can have us descend into a rerun of the end of the Roman Republic with our own Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. We could run that playbook and end up with an Augustus ushering in the approximately five centuries of American imperial rule by destroying the republic.
But what if I write a more hopeful tale. Not a utopia but a technocratic attempt to find a better way to organize society. Of course, artificial intelligence (AI) is the boogeyman of the day right now and it gets stood up as the cause of and cure for all our problems. So, I can easily be accused of jumping on the bandwagon if I have Connors use some form of AI to help design a different framework for integrating people with an optimal result for the great majority of the population.
Now, I freely admit I haven’t the foggiest idea what that would look like or even if such a thing is even theoretically possible. I wouldn’t want to end up looking like Plato does when someone reads through his “Republic” and the whole thing is a bunch of feeble arguments where he knocks down a bunch of straw men on his way to enthroning “philosopher kings” as his best and brightest ruling over his ant hive of an ancient brave new world.
But I think I would like to play around with this idea of a trillionaire re-ordering society along logical lines to optimize human happiness. So that’s kind of my take on the sequel’s plot. Of course, the first question I’m asking myself is whether the attempt is a success or a failure. I’ll have to roll it around to see which is more interesting. Have patience oh my friend Polemarchus.