I got really bored, so now I'm reviewing revivals. This is the first review I'm doing. And probably the last because this scene is just that dry lmao
I'll only look at revivals that have piqued my interest in one way or another. And I'm quite picky when it comes to revivals, so don't expect another review from me for a while.
Also, this is a long one. If you want my final thoughts, just scroll down to the Final verdict. You'll see it.
I'm looking at Project X Reborn, as I've heard people say good things about it. Also plenty of bad, but from what I can tell, that's just pointless drama brought on by two ex-staff. I don't care about that, what matters is what I can actually tell about the revival itself. Future me talking: I had no idea what I was getting into here. I regret EVERYTHING.
I'll be judging revivals on three factors: The client(s), the website and the community.

Client(s):

After checking everything else out about this revival, I've decided to not even bother messing with their clients. Wasn't planning to skip this part, but after I show you everything else, you'll see why I did. WHY DID THIS HAVE TO HAPPEN WITH THE FIRST REVIVAL I CHOOSE DUDE LIKE SERIOUSLY WHY

Website:

This is not a very good website. A lot of stuff on here is just nonfunctional. I'm almost convinced that it's using shoddily put-together code from another revival. And considering this is an ECS-based revival... yeah, makes sense.
Genre search on the Catalog just doesn't work at all.
I AM CRAPPING MY PANTS AS WE SPEAK.
Literally everything on the bottom of the site leads to a 404.
Nobody can help you now.
The "Upgrade Now" button leads you to a completely different part of the website, specifically the part that only shows up when you're logged out.
Bootleg 2016 website...
Suddenly it's different?
Oh yeah, the site looks totally different when logged out for some reason. It's like you're transported to a completely different site. That's not a classic Roblox thing, that's a MODERN Roblox thing! so much for the retro experience smh my head /s
In terms of positives... it loads fast? I'm not giving any points for looking like the old website, as it's mimicking an era of Roblox where the site looked pretty bad. But that's just my opinion, others will probably feel differently about it, I dunno.
I could ignore these flaws if the community could pick up the slack. But about that...

Community:

From what I've seen in the very brief time I spent in their server, this community is RIDICULOUSLY UNHINGED. Forget Project X, they should've named this revival Aphrodisiac.
Some of the images I've seen in this server I'm scared to send here as I think it could risk me getting banned from the sub. I could mark this post as NSFW, but I think just posting a few examples should get my point across all the same.
how is this funny
i genuinely worry for this person's wellbeing
this message got pinned. bruh.
the fact that most of these were from a small timespan yesterday goodness
Seriously keep in mind that this isn't even the worst of it that I'm aware of. Heck, as I was writing this, there were people posting worse than this. Here's what one of the staffs "friends" had to say to that:
The message I replied to was deleted. I guarantee that if I didn't mention it, it would've gone unmoderated. And vein deleted their message as shika threatened to remove their friend role.
I can't stress this enough, good revivals have stuff like strict moderation and zero tolerance for degenerate behavior for a reason. These are places typically populated by people under the age of 18. And when the line between memes and actual degeneracy begins to get gray in communities like this, it only leads to bad things happening.
These are not servers for "The Boys™" to hang out and post things unfiltered, they're Roblox revivals. In any other revival I've been in, most of what I've seen on this server would get you permabanned. Here however, your messages get put on the starboard and even pinned. I can not find any justifications for this.
When even the owner constantly complains about the degeneracy surrounding their community, all I must ask is this: Why not actually do something about it?
GEE, I WONDER.
This was pinned in #english-chat.
Seriously, when THIS needs to be clarified, that's when you know SOMETHING is wrong.
After just looking around, I can say that I am not surprised that rumors are going out against shika. Not because they actually did anything (I don't think they did), but because of what's been allowed to exist under their ownership. Something really needs to change here before things get bad.

Final verdict: I can not recommend this revival whatsoever.

I was going into this expecting the community to be bad, that's par for the course with these sorts of revivals. But this was a whole other level of terrible that I just refuse to give it any sort of chance. Shame, I wanted a nice 2016 revival to make stupid games on. Hard ask, apparently.
I know that I didn't put much time into investigating this revival, but from all I've seen, I really don't want to. I could've just come in at a wrong time. Definitely possible, considering a lot of the screenshots I've shown were from such a small timeframe. But first impressions mean a lot, and the impression that I got was that this revival's favorite color is off-white.
Don't get things twisted - I do not want this to be a hate post or witch hunt or whatever. I truly believe that it's not too late to change things here. Syntax was in a similar position once, but it managed to improve significantly in its later months. It's not too late for Project X to do the same. I don't think it is, anyway.
That's all I've got for now. I may come back in like a month or so to see if things have changed or not. If it stays up that long, that is. You never know about revivals anymore.
Anyways I hope the next revival I decide to write about is passable enough for me to actually want to download the client. Thank you all for coming to my TED talk.

Noncorresponding Migration Law is named from three meanings: first, laws in this position have no aggregative heart function, do not correspond to Hearts and Heartland Laws; second, the laws have not substantial obstructive effects, do not correspond to Color Laws, also not corresponding to None-as Laws (cf. section 11.6.4); thirdly, the laws have birth, death, and mutation properties, therefore they are Migration Laws also.
There are twenty-four Noncorresponding Migration Laws in total: (1) Have Gain, (2) Life Root, (3) Category Differentia, (4) Mutant Nature, (5) Thoughtless Stillness; (6) Extinctive Stillness, (7) Thoughtlessness Retribution, (8) Name Body, (9) Sentence Body, (10) Literary y Body, (11) Birth, (12) Oldness, (13) Dwell, (14) Impermanence, (15) Cycle; (16) Definite Difference, (17) Correspondence, (18) Potency and Velocity, (19) Sequence, (20) Time; (21) Direction, (22) Number, (23) Combinability, (24) Non-Combinability.
https://preview.redd.it/zyzntgwk9y3d1.jpg?width=2020&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2911a33184756c588325a8885deeb76b6c8e6010
(1) Have Gain, based on the juristic differential position in sentient body and heart, three gains are established: (A) seed achievement, (B) self-sufficiency achievement, and (C) presently performance achievement. (A) Seed achievement. Seed is the meaning of root, cause, and escalation. In the sentient body, some laws that are not active but have the function of potential forces are seed achievement, such as the three non-defilement roots: root of unknowing which should be known, root of having known, and root of all knowing all seeing. The “root of unknowing which should be known” means that somebody interests to, wills to learn Four Cruxes (aka. Four Noble Truths), he or she has the root (or seed). When a man understands the four cruxes, he has the root of having known. After she proves the four cruxes, she has the root of all knowing all seeing (i.e., fig.11.4.4.2-2).
In Illustration 11.4.4.2-15, the second picture from left to right is Enlightenment Seed, which is the seed of “Non-Upper Correct-Equality Correct-Perception” (Sanskrit as Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi). The seed is the making of these four great vows: Sentient beings are edgeless, I vow: I ferry them all! Annoyances are endless, I vow I sever them all! Juristic doors are limitless, I vow I study them all! Buddha’s path is non-upper, I vow I endeavor to succeed! The Bodhicitta (i.e., enlightenment heart) seed is also known as Bodhicitta precept, and Will Ark. (B) Self-sufficiency achievement means becoming an independent autonomous individual who is self-sufficient in his or her needs. (C) Performance achievement is that seeds are arising presently as bodily orally and intentionally behaviors.
(2) Life Root is the sentient life; depending on behaviors of preceding karma, unconsciousness’ mutant fruits succeeding-ly sustain the physical and mental life.
(3) Category Differentia is established according to category differentiae of sentient body and heart’s differentiation. For example, based on sentient beings' abidance and transgression by the Ten Fundamental Precepts, and according to their hearts, annoyances, and environments, they are categorized as the six interests: hell-interest, livestock interest, hungry-ghost interest, asura-interest, human-interest, and sky-interest (Illustration 11.4.4.2-1 to 22; Cf. Chapter 13).
(4) Mutant Nature, mutant is a synonym for mundane people, is established by its seeds of annoyances and knows. And annoyances and knows hinder mundane beings departing from their own natures, so the two are also called annoyance hindrance and know hindrance.
Annoyance hindrances are “mean annoyances”, also known as mean muddles, such as greed, irritability, ignorance, arrogance, suspicion, Seth view, edge view, heresy, view fetch, precept fetch, and so on. Know hindrances are “view annoyances”, also known as view muddles, such as Seth view, edge view, heresy, view fetch, precept fetch, greed, irritation, ignorance, arrogance, suspicion, etc.
Annoyance hindrance and know hindrance are interdependent and pairs. Annoyance is recognized by know and know is felt by annoyance, so the two have the same head number and name. Annoyance hindrances are foolishness, ignorance, which can quietness, hinder nirvana. The know hindrance is like intelligence but not intelligence, and can obstruct intelligence and enlightenment, so it is also called the intelligence hindrance.
(5) Thoughtless Stillness, also known as Heartless Stillness and Longevity Sky, is one of the eight difficulties of life in Buddhism. The saying is that that a mutant who enters meditation and, with the intention to terminate thinks, continues to forcefully suppress preconsciousness (i.e., Eve-sense), day after day, month after year. Preconsciousness becomes thinner and thinner and is eventually snapped off. This meditator becomes a plant man or woman and dwells in the Longevity Sky waiting for the fruit of this Non-think Stillness to be consumed and then falls back to mundane world. Stillness is one heart state in which the subjective and objective change mutually, the person is even not a heart, how is that called a stillness? Because to terminate thinks is the first thing to go, and the body and mind are at peace, so it is called Thoughtless Stillness.
(6) Extinctive Stillness, also known as Terminating-Objective Stillness, is the state in which all objectives are terminated, is nirvana (i.e., Fig. 11.4.4.2-2 No Objective Sky). Nirvana is an None-as Law (aka Un-striving Law), so how can he or she also reach Nirvana when he or she makes such an effort to eliminate the objective objects, which is a Have-as Law (aka Striving Law)? In her or his efforts to act, she or he will surely experience many setbacks and failures, and there will be many moments of discouragement and losing heart, those frustrations or losing hearts correspond to unconsciousness’ renunciative acceptance, therefore also increase the presenting probability of nirvana.
(7) Thoughtlessness Retribution, i.e., Thoughtlessness Mutant Mature, is a brief phase of no-thought that may occur to meditator. Ancient Virtues explain that people often have negative or suicidal thoughts, thus planting the seed of thoughtlessness. When the seed is ripened by fumigation, it initiates the presentation. The ripening of thoughtlessness is a normal phenomenon and is harmless.
(8) Name Body, explains self-nature of laws, such as the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body, etc.
(9) Sentence Body explains the differences of laws, such as the saying, "The unconscious is the total root of the pre-consciousness, intent-sense, and body-sense, etc.; and pre-consciousness shiftily support the eye-sense or the ear-sense, etc., so becomes a continually updating work-platform of mind.”
(10) Literal Body, is words, is the basis for names and sentences.
(11) Birth is from none to have among migrations of “Category Differentiae”.
(12) Oldness is deterioration during the successions of migrations, changing into damage is old.
(13) Dwell is going along the course of the successions of migrations.
(14) Impermanence means fade and extinction during the successions of migrations. Impermanence is one of the Three Juristic Seals, the charter of Buddhism. The Three Juristic Seals are: migrations are impermanent, laws have no I (“I” means “Seth View”, lord), nirvana is quietness.
(15) Cycle, Sanskrit Samsara, means that six Interests of sentient beings are driftingly circulating in the three boundaries nine lands (see fig. 11.4.4.2) of the Three-Grand Great-Grand World.
(16) Definite Differentiation is the difference, also known as Fixed Number, which is established on the various differences of cause and effect. For example, the wonderful behavior is the cause of the lovable fruit, and the ferocious behavior is the cause of the unlovable fruit; the fixed differentiation is established on the various differences of cause and effect. For example, the ten lower evils (see Section 13.1.3) are the cause of the hungry ghost interest people; this causal relationship is fixed. For another example, a person who has entered the second meditation (see Section 12.2.2) will definitely be reborn in the Light Sound Sky after death; this causal relationship is fixed. The last example is that when God chooses the husband for his daughter Eve, Adam (or the golden boy) must have experienced the fourth meditation (see section 12.2.4), because people who have experienced the fourth meditation are qualified to go to hell to retrieve the "human bones” (i.e. “Buddha's-bone abnegated-benefit”, God's own bones) and give them to Eve, so that she can wake up to become the worldly No.1 and the mother of all living beings.
(18) Potency Speed is established based on the swift flow of the law of cause and effect.
(19) Sequence, that is one by one in the flow of cause and effect.
(20) Time is established in the continuous flow of cause and effect. Based on the continuous succession of cause and effect, if this cause and effect has been born and extinguished, the past time is established; if it has been born and not extinguished, the present time is established; if it has not been born, the future time is established. Also, the Mundane-World is defined as between two times. Based on the characteristics of the transcendence and growth of unconsciousness (anciently known as God-sense), the ancients established Catastrophe Calendar. In the upper right corner of Illustration 11.4.4.2 is a Mexican catastrophe calendar stone. There are four medium catastrophes in a Mundane-World, namely, Establishment Catastrophe, Dwell Catastrophe, Damage Catastrophe, and Empty Catastrophe. Each Medium Catastrophe consists of 20 small catastrophes. One small catastrophe is composed by one increase and one decrease.
The catastrophe calendar is generally used where the time is very slow or where the logic of time does not exist, such as the Hour Minute Sky (see fig. 11.4.4.2-12) and above and the hell. Figures 12 through 9, where the time goes by slowly, often counted in thousands of solar calendar years. To the Great God Sky (see fig. 8), where the logic of time no longer exists, so only catastrophe calendar can be used to count. Time is unstable in hell, sometimes forward and sometimes backward, so the catastrophe calendar is also commonly used to count time there. Interestingly, the ancient Sumerians converted the number of catastrophes of Sumeru (i.e., Adam) during his time in hell into 300 solar calendar years, so that the 100 solar calendar years in which Allah created the world and made man became 400 solar calendar years. Modern historians have found in the Sumerian King's Table an extra 300 solar calendar years for that period of history and do not know how to explain it.
(21) Direction, according to the front, back, right, and left of substantial forms, four dimensions of east, west, south, north, and up and down directions are established. Religions in general all have content to talk about the mental world, the inner world, also known as Five Nodes World, such as the first chapter of Bible which tells a mind-mechanical parable in the Five Nodes World. Religions call the solar light world, the materialist world, as Vessel World.
(22) Number is set up on the one-by-one difference of the many color-hearts’ migrations.
(23) Combinability, i.e., the aggregation of the crowds of factors gathered. As in the case of the sense laws, cause and effect are successive, they must be reconciled by means of a multitude of factors: the roots must be intact, the environment must be present, and the attention to generate senses must arise properly. All other laws can be known in this way.
(24) Non- combinability, as is evident from the opposite of combinability. For example, God-sense (i.e., immaculate part of unconsciousness), also known as Fortune (i.e., God-sense), root of all-knowing all-seeing, and salvation, is non-combinable with aggregate, fetch, and have, because unconsciousness only corresponds to renunciative acceptance.
Return to Content of Chapter 11🎄Tree of Life

ID, IX. MAIORES. V, CAL. IUNI. FORTUNA PRIMIGENIA.

I discovered this book by complete chance last year – a very old hardback copy was given to me as gift (in a situation which was certainly weighted with the most unlikely of synchronicities), “huh,” I thought, “it’s a first edition of H.G. Wells,” the book itself almost cannot be opened because it is so old and falling apart so I procured a text and audio file of the thing relatively easily and began to read. In hindsight not only for myself but I fancy for the generations of the last fifty years - in all totality, it is deeply strange that this book has not been more widely recognized or taught in schools, as like 1984 and Brave New World, as being the third contender (although technically the second, published one year after Huxley – seemingly written at the same time interestingly enough) in “visions of dystopia” – except that the book is not so much a vision of dystopia tomorrow but a vision of dystopia ‘today’ or rather ‘life as we know it’ of the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries (endless war, endless pandemics, economic and logistic chaos), narrated from the comfortable and reassuring position of a society far far in the future who have long since revised their culture and solved all of the causes of the problems and become a society of genius polymaths “with (every Man and Woman) the intellectual equal of the polymaths of the ancient world.”
Now, I do not mean here to seem to ‘sweet-talk’ the reader into rushing out and buying this book or to hold it up in the manner of those other books as if it were some ideological blueprint but instead to assay the thing in the natural context which seems to me to be universally unrealized and which presents itself to us as a thing which is plainly self-evident, that is: that in the depressing and miserable dichotomy of 1984 and Brave New World; two extremely atomizing and miserable narratives, that there is also – far more empowering – The Shape Of Things To Come wherein the miserable protagony and antagony of both 1984 and Brave New World might read as merely a footnote somewhere in the middle of the book as an example of the witless measures mankinds old master undertook to preserve their power in an untenable circumstance. In other words, we know all about 1984 as children; we have this drummed into our heads and we glean our cultural comprehension that dictators cannot be cliques of business people but only lone individuals, usually in military uniform, and then we graduate from that to Brave New World to gain a more sophisticated comprehension of the feckless consumerism and ‘passive egoism’ by which our society actually operates, but then we do not – as I argue we ought – continue along in our education with this third book which actually addresses the matters at hand at a more adult level.
For instance, here, from ‘The Breakdown Of Finance And Social Morale After Versailles’ (Book One, Chapter Twelve) addresses in a single paragraph the cause of our continual economic chaos (of which all crime and poverty and war originates from) and highlights the problem from which this chaos cannot be resolved yet could easily be resolved, “adjustment was left to blind and ill-estimated forces,” “manifestly, a dramatic revision of the liberties of enterprise was necessary, but the enterprising people who controlled politics (would be) the very last people to undertake such a revision,”

…the expansion of productive energy was being accompanied by a positive contraction of the distributive arrangements which determined consumption. The more efficient the output, the fewer were the wages-earners. The more stuff there was, the fewer consumers there were. The fewer the consumers, the smaller the trading profits, and the less the gross spending power of the shareholders and individual entrepreneurs. So buying dwindled at both ends of the process and the common investor suffered with the wages- earner. This was the "Paradox of Overproduction" which so troubled the writers and journalists of the third decade of the twentieth century.

It is easy for the young student to-day to ask "Why did they not adjust?" But let him ask himself who there was to adjust. Our modern superstructure of applied economic science, the David Lubin Bureau and the General Directors' Board, with its vast recording organization, its hundreds of thousands of stations and observers, directing, adjusting, apportioning and distributing, had not even begun to exist. Adjustment was left to blind and ill-estimated forces. It was the general interest of mankind to be prosperous, but it was nobody's particular interest to keep affairs in a frame of prosperity. Manifestly a dramatic revision of the liberties of enterprise was necessary, but the enterprising people who controlled politics, so far as political life was controlled, were the very last people to undertake such a revision.

There is a clever metaphor I fancy that Wells worked in to this for the ‘actual’ defacto controlling class of things, that is: not really the politicians (sorry to disappoint the Orwell and conspiracy fans) but instead the ‘Dictatorship of the Air’ which might easily read as the ‘Dictatorship of the Airwaves’ – in colloquial language, that being radio and then television. Certainly we might imagine Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner or Sumner Redstone (of yesterday) entering into honourable retirement as like the ‘dictators of the air’ of the very last days before the establishment of a one world state – in any case that is how things would work out, as the power of, say, Ted Turner to eradicate a political party in the United States – at any time he wishes – by simply green-lighting coverage of their bad actions relentlessly for months until revolution occurs is a real power of which no other institution possesses nor possesses any means of defence against, i.e. the ‘real power’ in our world to end a war or begin or war or end this or begin that is that power held by the organized press. This metaphor is somewhat of a more mature view, I think, than Wells earlier conception of the press in The Sleeper Awakes (1899) where the press of a dystopian future is visualized as a “babble machine” spreading circular nonsense to preoccupy the citizenry (although this is arguably a true representation of the mental processes of the Twitter and Facebook user, or of the general baby-speak and extremely infantile form of the news reports on the front page of the BBC News website) which is more or less what the press depicted as being in Brave New World also.
However the construction of sudden new realities (or sudden ‘actualities’) presented by the equation of interdependent technological innovations (i.e. the radio and the television in this instance) is mentioned early on in The Shape Of Things To Come in ‘How The Idea And Hope Of The Modern World State First Appeared’ (Book One, Chapter Two),

The fruitlessness of all these premature inventions is very easily explained. First in the case of the Transatlantic passage; either the earlier navigators who got to America never got back, or, if they did get back, they were unable to find the necessary support and means to go again before they died, or they had had enough of hardship, or they perished in a second attempt. Their stories were distorted into fantastic legends and substantially disbelieved. It was, indeed, a quite futile adventure to get to America until the keeled sailing ship, the science of navigation, and the mariner's compass had been added to human resources. (Then), in the matter of printing, it was only when the Chinese had developed the systematic manufacture of abundant cheap paper sheets in standard sizes that the printed book—and its consequent release of knowledge—became practically possible. Finally the delay in the attainment of flying was inevitable because before men could progress beyond precarious gliding it was necessary for metallurgy to reach a point at which the internal combustion engine could be made. Until then they could build nothing strong enough and light enough to battle with the eddies of the air.

In an exactly parallel manner, the conception of one single human community organized for collective service to the common weal had to wait until the rapid evolution of the means of communication could arrest and promise to defeat the disintegrative influence of geographical separation. That rapid evolution came at last in the nineteenth century, and it has been described already in a preceding chapter of this world history. Steam power, oil power, electric power, the railway, the steamship, the aeroplane, transmission by wire and aerial transmission followed each other very rapidly. They knit together the human species as it had never been knit before. Insensibly, in less than a century, the utterly impracticable became not merely a possible adjustment but an urgently necessary adjustment if civilization was to continue.

In other words, then, a global state (or, rather, such power in general held by the press as I see the analogy extending to them as being the ‘Dictatorship of the Airwaves’) was impossible to imagine and completely laughable before the technologies had stacked together to reveal as like in a simple piece of arithmetic which produced a single outcome of the equation; that no sooner had the technologies existed then the thing had become an actual reality – in that 1) unassailable political power had been unthinkingly dropped into the lap of the owners of the press, but that more importantly as consequence that therefore 2) mankind was subject to that power, that is: the situation existed the moment the technologies did – and this whether any living person had even realized it, as I think quite naturally all the time Men and Women invent things that they really have no notion of the fullest or most optimal uses of (“nothing is needed by fools, for: they do not understand how to use anything but are in want of everything,” Chrysippus), e.g. in no metaphor the television was quite literally invented as a ‘ghost box’ to commune with ghosts imagined to reveal themselves by manipulating the black and white of the static until someone else had the idea that there was at least one other use for that contraption.
It is quite strange, also, that in contemporary times we have for ages been heavily propagandized ‘against’ the idea of a “one world state” as if, say, all the crimes and fecklessness that have gone on in our lifetimes are somehow secretly building towards the creation of such a thing – not a thing you would naturally conclude from an observation of those events nor a thing advocated for by anybody (insofar as I have ever heard) but it is a thing which would be the first logical response to ‘preventing’ such crimes from ever occurring again – such as like the already widely practiced concept of a Senate-Style Federation of Sovereign States rather than a hundred or so mutually antagonistic polities capable of bombing themselves or screwing up their economies and creating waves of refugees or mass starvation or pandemics, and so on. For instance, All Egypt is dependent on the flow of the Nile which originates in what is today another country, that other country recently decimated the flow of the Nile by gumming up the Nile with a Hydroelectric Dam; such an outcome would not occur if the total mass of the land itself was governed as the single interconnected economic and environmental system that it is in physical reality of which, when divided along arbitrary borderlines, there is no means to govern the entirety of the region in an amicable and prosperous manner for all as a whole and no recourse to the otherwise intolerable situation but War which is unlikely to occur – as most Nations are comprised of civilized peoples who rightly loath the concept of War – but it is the single and unavoidable outcome to resolve such a situation until that situation has dragged on for decades, causing immense suffering, until it reaches that point of desperation – the matter of Palestine and Israel, fresh to my mind in these days, raises itself also.
Of the matter of War itself, in ‘The Direct Action Of The Armament Industries In Maintaining War Stresses’ (Book One, Chapter Eleven), Wells relays in 1933 what United States President Eisenhower would later remark in 1961 in his farewell address of the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex; albeit far more analytically on Wells part, that: it is not so much the ‘desire to harm’ on the part of the armament industries which sees them engage in unnecessary build-up of weapons stockpiles but that it is simply their business to produce, to stockpile, produce more deadly variants and stockpile the more deadly variants and sell off their old stockpiles to whomsoever rings their doorbell; for instance the on-going War in Ukraine is no different in this regard to the Viet Cong and NATO Warfare in Vietnam in that massive quantities of cheap munitions were necessary for the war to be fought in the first place and massive quantities of munitions happened to exist as a by-product of the Armaments Industries to be dumped onto the warring parties in order to facilitate their macabre impulses at the expense of the citizenry; both at their cost in terms of the debt taken on to procure the weaponry on the part of their governments and in terms of their lives when the weaponry was utilized to the outcome of massive loss of life of a single peoples within a bordered space – a thing of no value to themselves. Simply put, albeit in a very simplistic reduction to the bare basics: the War would not reached such catastrophic inhuman proportions without massive quantities of cheap Armaments that otherwise sat taking up warehouse space for more valuable Armaments on the part of the producer and seller.

In a perpetual progress in the size and range of great guns, in a vast expansion of battleships that were continually scrapped in favour of larger or more elaborate models, (Armament Firms) found a most important and inexhaustible field of profit. The governments of the world were taken unawares, and in a little while the industry, by sound and accepted methods of salesmanship, was able to impose its novelties upon these ancient institutions with their tradition of implacable mutual antagonism. It was realized very soon that any decay of patriotism and loyalty would be inimical to this great system of profits, and the selling branch of the industry either bought directly or contrived to control most of the great newspapers of the time, and exercised a watchful vigilance on the teaching of belligerence in schools. Following the established rules and usages for a marketing industrialism, and with little thought of any consequences but profits, the directors of these huge concerns built up the new warfare that found its first exposition in the Great War of 1914-18, and gave its last desperate and frightful convulsions in the Polish wars of 1940 and the subsequent decades.

Even at its outset in 1914-18 this new warfare was extraordinarily uncongenial to humanity. It did not even satisfy man's normal combative instincts. What an angry man wants to do is to beat and bash another living being, not to be shot at from ten miles distance or poisoned in a hole. Instead of drinking delight of battle with their peers, men tasted all the indiscriminating terror of an earthquake. The war literature stored at Atacama, to which we have already referred, is full of futile protest against the horror, the unsportsmanlike quality, the casual filthiness and indecency, the mechanical disregard of human dignity of the new tactics. But such protest itself was necessarily futile, because it did not go on to a clear indictment of the forces that were making, sustaining and distorting war. The child howled and wept and they did not even attempt to see what it was had tormented it.

To us nowadays it seems insane that profit-making individuals and companies should have been allowed to manufacture weapons and sell the apparatus of murder to all comers. But to the man of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it seemed the most natural thing in the world. It had grown up in an entirely logical and necessary way, without any restraint upon the normal marketing methods of peace-time commerce, from the continually more extensive application of new industrial products to warfare. Even after the World War catastrophe, after that complete demonstration of the futility of war, men still allowed themselves to be herded like sheep into the barracks, to be trained to consume, and be consumed, by new lines of slaughter goods produced and marketed by the still active armament traders. And the accumulation of a still greater and still more dangerous mass of war material continued.

The book is, if the reader has likely already gathered from the excerpts, not written in the style of a protagonal narrative; i.e. not as a story, i.e. no hero and no villain, but as a sort of a Historia Augusta – that is really the most fitting comparison I think of when trying to describe this to a new reader (or perhaps J.J. Scarisbrick’s Henry VIII), that is to say it is written ‘as’ a History in the classical style we are familiar with from the better of the ancient writers, as like Appian or Cassius Dio, but unlike Suetonius or Tacitus it is absent of the sloppy hinging of all bad things on the highly personalized propaganda ad hominem (i.e. blame the fall of empire on one guy) that goes in those narrative works as we are typically familiar with them.
It is, of course, a work a fiction; although Wells did predict World War Two beginning in late 1939-1940 (although he had Poland putting up much better and longer of a fight against the Germans) and various other innovations, beginning from his own day with a true account of events prior to his own day – giving us a valuable account of affairs and actors prior to 1933 which would otherwise not come easily to any of us to discover. But the book, ultimately, is vehicle for the transmission and discussion of these societal (i.e. social, economic, industrial, logistic) matters presented to the audience of the day fresh, in their own minds, from the abject horror recently witnessed in World War One – and the economic catastrophes of which Roosevelts reforms had not yet come into tangible reality (i.e. relief for the poor, public works projects such as the motorways across America) as is discussed in that other seemingly little known H.G. Wells literary offering in his face-to-face interview with Josef Stalin the following year in 1934 (something which I think is of far more historical value than say, Nixon and Frost or Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis), so as to ‘avert’ another crisis and pluck from the ether a seemingly alternate trajectory of where Mankind might at last get its act together. This ‘novel’ (thought it seems strange to call it that) ought be read, I would advise, in conjunction with ‘The Sleeper Awakes’ (1899) and also the (actually very depressing – I would not advise it) short-story prequel ‘A Story Of The Days To Come’ (1897) – set in that same universe – which, perhaps it is because I am English, seems to me to be a black horror show of the reality that we actually find ourselves living in this far into an actually dystopic future – or perhaps yet with the ‘strange windmills’ powering the mega cities that this a future yet to come (no pun intended); the broken speech, the babble machines, the miserable condition of the Working Class and their consumption of pre-packaged soft bread, the desire to flee the urban sprawl into the dilapidated countryside and make a little life in a run-down house with tacky wallpaper peeling away … ah, forgive me, my point is that ‘our condition’; i.e. those of us literate in English, is quite analogous to the condition of the central characters in those two stories; a culture dulled intellectually to the point that they can barely speak or think, being appraised and assayed by ourselves; those of us simply literate, as to render our commentary stuck as to seem as mutually alien as like Caesar in Gaul. However, it is in the context of the frame given to us in ‘The Shape Of Things To Come’ that we might gain a degree of sanity about this self-same situation; to study and lean into that dispassionate quality as to discern the nature of things as they are and recognize how important this quality is in relation to Well’s ultimate outcome for the best possible position of Humankind far far future, that is: that of Humankind’s vital intellectual capacity, and that the most striking message of STC, beyond all we have mentioned in this little overview, is that intellectual capacity in and of itself.
For example, when we consider the ‘actuality’ of the power of Turner or perhaps Zuckerberg in his heyday, for instance, we consider a power fallen into a Mans lap by an accidental stacking of disparate technologies created not by himself but of which possess a power utterly dependent in that same equation upon on a population being ‘witless’ in the first place and so led slavishly by the “babble machines”. However you cut it, reader, the great uplifting of Humankind to a standard of autonomy and intellectual prowess – not held by an elite but possessed by All People – is a thing both intrinsically self-sufficient within our grasp for our own selves and is certainly the prerequisite for political matters in that intellectual capacity of the voting public determines entirely whether a public is tricked or foolish and gets themselves into trouble by undertaking some obvious error or whether they are immune to such trickery and foolishness in the first place and that their energies and time are spent on more valuable pursuits. It seems to me that our contemporary society has done away with the notion of good character through intellect and that we live with the outcome of this; being shepherded by emotional manipulation and brute force because our society at large is treated as if we lacked the verbal and intellectual toolsets to understand anything else – moreover possessing no means to discern whether or not what is forced onto us is right or wrong; truth or lies, and so on. Such a society as this, again it seems plain to me, is ‘any’ dystopia because it is the baseline composition for ‘all’ dystopia; as like the foolish dogma of an out-dated ideology for example rests itself upon a large enough contingent of the public being either treated as if they were or in fact are “too foolish” to discuss or think a thing through, so a dogma is poured over them like concrete creating, in turn, intolerable circumstances as the dogma, tomorrow, becomes out-dated and suddenly instructs them to do foolish things, as like in the “Banality Of Evil” (read: Hannah Arendt) as the character in all serious perpetrators of inhumanity who insist, with a confused expression on their faces, that they were just doing their job – and this ‘quality’, of extreme ignorance, is the composition of the culture where such ‘evil actions’ occur.
I mean here that in STC we have on one hand a very in-depth account, very serious reading, to graduate the reader out of the depressive, atomizing, disempowering, conspiratorial milieu and mire of ‘life’ presented to us in 1984 and Brave New World, but that we have at the same time the very resonant harmonics that one does not need to “wait around for a distant future utopia” to “solve all the problems” but that the tools to do so are well within our grasp at any time we so choose and of which such an undertaking constitutes the foundation stones and tapestries of that future utopia which, I think, could be said to “meet us half-way” in many of these matters, as like we reach forward and they reach back and then those in the past reach forward and we in the present reach back; that is anyway what it is to learn from the past and anyway the answer to “why the Grandfather sews the seeds for trees from whose fruits he will never eat.”
Valete.

ID, IX. MAIORES. V, CAL. IUNI. FORTUNA PRIMIGENIA.

FULL TEXT ON GUTENBERG OF H.G. WELLS ‘THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME’ (1933)
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