Plumbers' Guild

On 16th August 2007 I speculated in the other place about a place called Megaisle, where evil bankers extracted a parasitic living out of the decent hard working plumbers.

I now learn, from the Economist I think, about a rather different sort of Megaisle, a world where one has the powers - the people with all the dosh and all the levers of power - and the proles - who have pretty much nothing.

Megaisle is blessed with abundant supplies of energy, let us say in the form of oil. Now it is true that it takes a certain amount of bother to set things up, but once they are set up one simply operates as a giant petrol station. People come along and give you lots of money to fill up. Then, with that money you can buy whatever you want; no need to bother with the tiresome business of growing anything or making anything. Or interacting with proles.

The number of people required for all this is very small, with the result that the vast majority of the proles don't have anything to do. From the point of view of the powers there might be some merit in having a cull, just leaving enough to provide a pool from which servants, pole-dancers and such like can be drawn. But the powers have not quite got around to a cull yet, they simply keep the proles on rather short rations. Don't bother too much with their health or education or anything like that.

But there is a catch. There are very long pipelines which are used to move the oil around from one part of Megaisle to another and these very long pipelines are an easy target for direct action by disaffected proles or, indeed, by terrorists with less scruples and more obscure agendas. So the powers have to spend a significant proportion of the dosh on security, to the point where security is far and away the biggest employer in Megaisle. Security which can also be used to push back on the proles should they get restive.

So what is different about this vision of Megaisle, is that the proles, unlike the plumbers, are more or less superfluous. There might be millions and millions of them but the powers don't give a toss. They are just the dross floating around beyond their known world. Over the horizon. It doesn't really matter what they get up to or don't get up to - so long as they keep their distance. No social contract being enforced here thank you very much.