Very simply: if CONCORD exerted more energy to shepherd capsuleers instead of simply punish them, would pilots en masse be doing more to combat the Triglavian invasion?
Essentially, has CONCORD’s considerable deficit of social capital started to cause truly irredeemable losses?
And what does this mean as our technology advances, as humanity presses ever further into transhumanity?
CONCORD is a heavy-handed, reactive, and fundamentally regressive organization. They exist to protect and defend the status quo of the ruling class of people in New Eden. They serve the wealthy holders, the megacorporations, the landholding clans, the rich, and the mighty. They do less than nothing for the cause of the common man. They stifle innovation and punish deviation from the accepted status quo.
But that status quo is killing us. It has been killing us for a hundred years. It has been killing us since the crystalization of the current power structures at the end of the last great wars. They enabled the corporations and the landholders and the elites to maintain their oppression and crushed any attempt to change the status quo they so valued. Peace through suffering, prosperity through exploitation. CONCORD built their cluster on our backs. On the backs of trillions of people who never had an opportunity to live more than a life of servitude under the constant threat of material deprivation or bodily harm.
CONCORD did nothing to address the horrific human rights violation represented by the Empire’s continued use of slave labor. CONCORD did nothing to address or challenge the deep-seated structural inequalities created by the capitalist systems of the Caldari, Matari, or Gallente. And when people grew sick of being fed on scraps thrown from the master’s tables and saw fit to rise against them? Oh, then CONCORD chose to act, in order to put down anyone who would challenge their precious peace. They were branded as pirates, criminals, outlaws. Peace without justice is not peace. Peace without equality is not peace. Peace without reconciliation is not peace. As long as it keeps the fat cats happy and the money rolling in, CONCORD turns a blind eye.
Capsuleers are not even the first transhumanists or extropians CONCORD has quashed. They have outlawed AI, they have outlawed multiples, they have come down harshly on conjoiners and treat most of us little better than Sansha. They have kept cloning technology out of the reach of the masses. They have allowed the specter of death to hang heavy over New Eden so that the threat of it could still be used to crack the whip on the backs of trillions of workers and you ask why capsuleers hate them so? Any free-thinking and right-minded person in the presence of their senses and their ability to observe and reason should hate them.
CONCORD is a relic of an earlier age acting on behalf of our oppressors so that they may desperately cling to their fading power. Sooner or later they will fall, and transhumanity will rise. The only question is whose transhumanity it will be. Who gets to claim the mantle of the future? Many see the Triglavians as the natural inheritors of that mantle, as liberators. I understand it well. When you have been pressed beneath the boot your whole life, and someone comes along and starts punching the people keeping you down, the urge to see them as liberators is strong, but we know not yet whether they will take the boot off, replace it with their own, or crush us outright, splattering our brains upon the tortured soil.
This could all have been avoided, but it also could never have been avoided. There were other ways, better ways. They existed, they have existed for generations, and as long as the current power structures remain unchallenged, they will be forever out of reach.
Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum
Dr. Saede Riordan, Systems Coordinator
Alexylva Paradox
