10 December 2012
I apologize beforehand if this story seems a little preachy; I've been reading a lot of Ayn Rand lately and it might be rubbing off.
He stepped silently out of the shadows like a spectre, his face ashen in the cold moonlight, the wind lifting the tails of his suit jacket and playing with strands of his thick, chestnut hair. "So, it's come to this," he said to the assembled Crowd. The huddled masses stared back at him, grudgingly beseeching him for assistance. As a single creature, their mouths opened and, in a hundred different tongues, they begged him in a monotone voice, "Bring back to us that which we lost in the long ago ages. Bring back the hope. Bring back the worth. Free us from our slavery to each other. Free us from bondage and give us back our minds. Bring back the Self." The only sound was the wind that whistled through the otherwise silent air, the only witness to the stand-off between the two ancient foes. The man stood watching the miserable lot, their humanity long since lost to the forces of Progress and Community. The Stranger passionately replied, "You come to me now and ask for my assistance, yet it was you who imprisoned me so many years ago. It was you, your apathy, your ambivalence, that cast me aside and imprisoned me in the dark corners of the universe. It was your choice to sacrifice the Self for the greater good. So why now do you come to me and ask for a renewal? What has changed among you that you are not only willing, but able, to pursue once more the aspect of Self?" At this, The Crowd turned and parted down the middle, allowing one figure to make it's way forward. This small shambling figure didn't march to the beat that The Crowd marched to. It didn't blink in unison or hold it's arms rigidly at the side. Instead, it tottered forward on legs almost too week to walk. It stumbled and fell against the leg of one of The Crowd, but he/she didn't even look down at it. When it finally floundered into the moonlight, The Stranger saw it for what it truly was. A child. "I see, but I don't believe. How is it that a society of a single, universal, completely uniform sentience was able to create a child? I know it wasn't intentional, because you lot haven't reproduced even once before during the four hundred years I've been imprisoned. So how did you do it!?" The Crowd just stared, no response, no sign of life, nothing to differentiate one person from the other. As the child began to wail, The Stranger stepped forward and scooped it, her, up. This nameless, homeless, parentless child; born to some mother who didn't realize she was a woman from a father who didn't realize he was man, this was the child that would save Humanity. For it was this child, born free of the bonds of The Crowd and Community, that had rekindled the faintest trace of The Self. It was the independent will of the child that had brought The Crowd, without knowing why, to the site where The Stranger had been imprisoned in days long gone; days when he was not the last of his kind and there were still others aware of the knowledge of Self. Now that the child had brought The Stranger out of his confinement, the resurrection of independence could begin.
The Stranger and The Crowd • Opuss № I