Read Chapter 16 “Time Travelling”
Systematic hateful propaganda spread fast across the world, causing unimaginable, long-term damage. The idea of them and us entered the social and political stage, splitting friends, families and neighbours. Once that seed of division started growing in people’s minds and hearts, it never really left their consciousness. Soon enough people couldn’t distinguish fiction from reality and truth from lies. The more lies the general public was fed, the harder it became to untangle the truth. In many cases, the truth wasn’t simply attractive enough or was too harsh for the general public to face.
Long-time before the division of the world became a reality, corporations extensively lobbied the once in power by supporting individual politicians and political factions, which was the perfect move to fertiliser the growth of the Corporate Government.
At first, the rise of the Corporate Government wasn’t universally visible. They acted in the shadows, slowly enslaving and addicting the population to products, promoted by the political class and driven by the need to maximise profit. With time, the corporations got greedy and begun to resist any kind of progressive change that the governments wanted to enforce by spreading chaos and disinformation. The only purpose of this was to cause as much destabilization as possible to swoop in and create a world enslaved to the wealthiest privileged few.
Once the balanced fabric of the society was destabilized, the inequality between the poor and the rich grew enormously, which was skillfully weaponized by the populist parties to make people believe that austerity and ecological degradation were the right choices to re-build the world order.
The general confusion created by the propaganda tactics was the beginning of a spectacular end of many thriving economies. Unfortunately, many opposition leaders were too scared to challenge the populist and soon enough adopted the populist’s tactics, adding bits of their own twist to those harmful rhetoric’s.
The Corporate Government for years kept on top of the campaign against the truth and reality, spreading elaborate lies and disinformation. The populistic celebrities and politicians were the key to that disinformation campaign. In the process, many old democracies fell to the populists, willing to go any length to stop the social progress.
However, one day an unexpected challenge entered the political realm; and it came from the most unforseen source. The children decided to take to the streets to protest against the environmental inaction. At first, the protests were just “amusing” to the political class. But the angrier the kids became, the more often they skipped school. All these protests created massive problems for their parents, who were unable to work, which in turn left many companies encounter substantial logistical and financial issues.
Kids can be stubborn when they want to be and reasoning with them is impossible, especially when they don’t trust the people negotiating and promising.
No amount of media coverage of the natural disasters got the adults in charge to act as fast as protesting school skipping children. That desperate act to save what was left of natural resources and Earth’s beauty pushed many people to shift their consciousness towards sustainability. That, in turn, led the voting population to demand real change with their votes. The countries that allowed change to grow and expand were soon to form Ecotopia, which became a symbol of resistance to the outdated worldviews represented by the populist Old World.
Women who cared very little for money, influence and power; everything most of their male counterparts in the Old World loved; pioneered the social revolution aided by the Eco Warriors refugees. For years the Eco Warriors were the only ones defending democracy, social norms and the environment. For their uncompromised stand and beliefs, they were monitored, prosecuted, eliminated and imprisoned. Within a few years, the Ecotopian manifesto became the only disrupting force in the bleak greyness of the global destruction of natural resources championed by the Old World, and their corporate mates.
The Corporate Government’s priority was always to oversee the growth of friendly companies, regardless of the consequences of that growth. All the political decisions made on every level were always accomodating the corporate interest first, ahead of everything and everyone else. For the politicians representing the corporate interests nothing needed to change as long as the population kept voting them in .
To fight Ecotopian ideas, the Old World started putting restrictions on the products shipped to the Ecotopian countries, believing that they could destroy them economically. However, from the very beginning, the Ecotopians were investing in self-sufficiency and innovation of circular economy, which helped them attract the brightest minds in the world, who wanted to build a socially just system that looked into sustainability as the only valid choice of survival for humanity.
Few years after the polarization of the worldviews it became undeniable that the already strained relations between the Ecotopians and the Old World ceased to exist. At first, the Old World declared a war against the Ecotopians, which they hoped would act as a diversion from the enormous economic and sustainable struggles they were trying to cover up at the time.
However, the war didn’t pan out the way the Corporate Government planned. So instead they build a massive wall as the last defining act to divide the world for good.