The Left Angle Cross of Revolution (Version 1)

Full breakdown

Leaving the fixed aspect behind, we arrive at Revolution — pure revolution. The uncomfortable core of it is money: 'they have it, they don't deserve it, let's kill the sons of bitches and split it up.' That is, at bottom, the foundation of revolution. In the fifth line, it's a practical revolution, coming from a purely practical standpoint: 'they're greedy bastards, they won't share, they hate us and keep us enslaved. We can't negotiate with them. Since that doesn't work, the only practical thing left is to kill them. Once we do, we'll have a practical way to divide everything up.'

We are, after all, living beings carrying endless world wars in our tissue with every breath — the violence built into our biology is staggering; look at our T-cells and you'll see real devastation. We exist within violence; that's simply the truth. We're built to kill, and that stays true as long as we live in these bodies — there's no shaking it off, or we wouldn't be at the top of the food chain. It can't be civilized away. Watch what happens when this cross moves into the Civilization quarter: Moses arrives and says, 'thou shalt not kill.' You were built to kill, that's true, but you're not allowed to. Don't do it — it's wrong.

Then civilization arrives and insists we all live together as good neighbors, and killing someone next door becomes a genuine problem, so we set up rules, designate places where killing can happen without disturbing anyone. Killing people from the next valley over becomes acceptable — even practical. We're only at the beginning of this history, still working through what was built into us from the start: go out and kill, and find some way to make it acceptable, even sanctified.

Listen to gate 49, and you hear a powerful potential revolutionary: 'I'm here to seduce you with revolution. I'm here to entice you with these principles.' It's a genuinely powerful force, and every fifth line draws projection — at the revolutionary's feet lies the expectation that they will liberate; fail that expectation, and the fifth line collapses. It's the fifth-line revolution that insists this is all extremely practical, and here's exactly what we're going to do.

For instance: let's dissolve every private farm and build one enormous farm the size of Europe, and grow more than anyone ever dreamed possible. Sounds practical — and can be devastating. 'Oh, and by the way, to get all those farms, we'll need to kill the previous owners, understood? It's practical, we clear them out of the way and build the big farm.' That's what these people do; that's what they've always done. We can't get rid of them. Sometimes we turn them into heroes, sometimes villains — notice, if they liberate, they're heroes; as long as they satisfy the projections of the people who follow their principles, they're always heroes.

The point was never simply to set a new principle and start a revolution — it's to actually benefit from it. There's no point in revolution without gain. One of the oldest human strategies for dealing with each other is attacking the tribe in the next valley: kill the men, impregnate the women, take them home. Part of how we learn from each other, historically — one tribe conquers another and brings its gods and its inner content along, and in taking over the other tribe, absorbs their gods and content in turn. Over time these things blend and something new emerges. That's how it works — in essence, we're built, in some sense, to go to the next village and kill and take.

There's a lot of judgment about this, but the people who arrive in the world with this cross arrive precisely for this purpose. Right now, three billion people go to bed hungry — expect all kinds of killing simply from that, because it comes down to food. Gate 49 demands that we, as a community, have enough to eat; if there isn't enough, the tribe goes to war to get it, because in the end, we're animals. The veneer of civilization is thin and fresh. People fuss over morality instead of understanding that everything has its place. That's simply how it is.

But in a world where people aren't properly fed, you can't cry for peace — you have to cry for organization. There's enough food to feed everyone, and there wouldn't need to be any of this trouble. One of the strongest themes from the very beginning is that we had to unite to survive — early humans had a hard time competing with the world around them, and had to develop communal skills, skills rooted in violence and defense. There's no escaping that. You can't just sit in a marble building and legislate that certain things can't be done, because you can't actually pass that law — we are the collective, and every individual aspect of life is present here, carried as archetype in real people.

49.6 has to make an enormous leap. When 49.6 comes down off the roof, it must come down carrying principles that let it provide for itself — principles that can then open to others too. But once that sixth line has this and finally comes down, what does it meet? Desire. That's how the Program works: you look back and grow anxious, you look ahead and sharpen your sword, and then desire arrives. As human beings, we're genuinely helpless in the sense of being driven; we barely register how powerful the whip is, how tempting the carrot dangling in front of us really is — a story that starts back at gate 30, in the right-angle Cross of Contagion.