How I'd like to see the world saved

[Sethomas]

When I attended a lecture on world poverty at the United Nations building, I asked myself what I would do with unlimited funds. I came to what I feel was a wonderful conclusion, albeit that it would require billions in start-up capital (that would ideally be repaid soon thereafter). Tonight I was working on a novel I'd like to finish someday before I die. It takes place sixty years in the future (it's not really a sci-fi novel, it just requires certain futuristic elements), so I figured, why not talk about my idea in the past tense? I knew I'd have to prognosticate problems with it to make it worth reading, so here's what I've typed up this past hour.
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The journey undertaken by Joël and Marissa began in Sub-Saharan Africa. Joël’s interest was in speaking to workers within industrial communes so as to perhaps discern a cause of their notoriously high suicide rates. The industrial communes were the brainchild of a Jesuit priest who, in the 2020s, envisioned a way to eradicate world hunger via “Anti-Marxist Communism”. Whereas Marx said that the family structure, religion, and the alienation one experiences of detachment from the fruits of wage labor were to be annihilated by the worker’s revolt, Father Panzeo built upon the supposition that they’d be the keystones of a functional, peacefully-instituted communism. Thus, in the piety movement that progressed from the Great Transformation of 2023 saw two billion donors raise just under one trillion dollars to erect super-complexes in Africa wherein family units would thrive. Children were to be schooled through age eighteen, being incrementally introduced to work alongside their parents beginning at age fifteen. The products of their wage labor generally included articles used in Western industry such as hydrogen reactor components or auto transmission parts. When a family unit had acquired an per-member average of twelve years of service, it was given the option to leave with accreditations that came to be highly esteemed even in Europe and the Americas. Thus the appeal of alienation came in: in dealing with high-technology components daily for years, Father Panzeo had hoped that the natives would aspire to fulfill their obligations and afterwards seek a life in which they might acquire said goods for themselves.

The factories within the complexes were of such financial viability that scholarships were widely granted to children of talent while the number of complexes surged from four at their inception in 2035 to thirty-seven in 2060. A typical complex was designed for 100,000 inhabitants and, including the on-site industrial centers, spanned just under a square mile. By 2065, thirty-five million people had passed through the Panzeo complexes.

For all his altruism, Father Panzeo was psychologically naïve. He had reckoned that the inhabitants would have been so content to leave their squalor that they’d rejoice in their sterile new homes. However, for the first twelve or so years there were frequent revolts—rather than just leave, as was their liberty, pockets of the natives chose to vandalize the facilities. Father Panzeo, who lived and worked in the very nature of the natives with the exception of having private quarters, was impaled on a metal lathe in the second such riot for lack of any actual weapons on the premises. When psychological analysts made living adjustments, the riots stopped entirely while suicides increased.

Joël drew few conclusions. Every person had their own story of satisfaction or discontent, but ennui abounded in spite of the complexes sacrificing utility for entertainment and self-teaching outlets. By this time virtually all the natives had some—usually conversational—proficiency in English, French, and Swahili. Each member to whom Joël spoke had her own preference for a conversational tongue. Each member had her own favorite academic subjects, each had her own dreams for her family’s days beyond the complex. Each member had her own thoughts on the Catholic masses, which varied greatly even within individual complexes so as to accommodate local tradition. The central tragedy Joël found in the Panzeo complexes was that feeding the millions detracted from nourishing the individual. The promise of the future fed them hope; the burden of a future introduced them to anxiety.