Bergeron-5

(Also referred to as “The World Without Equal”)

Current Year: 1962

''“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”''

-C.S. Lewis

The Earth occupying the universe designated as Bergeron-5 hosts a frightening global dystopian society. As with many dystopian parallels, the history of this world and its Point of Divergence from our own is difficult to ascertain due to the government’s secrecy, censorship and revisionism of actual history. However, evidence so far indicates that the current state of Bergeron-5 may have had its origins in the first decades of the 20th century where several nations in Europe underwent Communist Revolutions that did not occur in our timeline, which may have lead to a gradual spread of Communism across the globe. This may have in turn lead to the establishment of a world-government as an attempt to merge allied powers or ensure peace between opposing ones.

A series of past conflicts throughout the world seems to have also massively reduced the global population. Whether this depopulation was due to some sort of war before the establishment of the world-government, or a direct campaign of depopulation perpetrated by the world-government in an attempt to make the new world order more realistically manageable, is currently unknown. The current world population of Bergeron-5 is roughly 1.9 billion, as opposed to the figure of 3 billion that our world had in 1961. Areas such as India, China, Japan, South America and various regions of Africa currently have drastically lower populations than were seen in our universe.

The defining feature of Bergeron-5’s world-government is a borderline obsessive or even religious reverence for the concept of total social equality. Apparently having determined that inequality between human beings is the instigating force that leads to poverty, slavery, warfare, crime, genocide, racial oppression, bloody social revolutions and a myriad of other societal evils, the world-spanning government of this Earth has dedicated itself to the concept and enforcement of “equality” for the good of all mankind. This altruistic goal is being pursued with often brutal and upsetting methods.

The Structure of Equilibrium
The enforcement of global equality is done firstly with a global economic system that overtly resembles Communism. The Office of Livelihood, as it is called, controls nearly every functional aspect of the citizen’s lives, deciding on education and employment as far as what would best fit the global standards of equality. Education is consistently overall poor, very basic and focused more on training for a future lifelong career and state indoctrination than subjects conducive to intellectual growth, since the inherent differences in learning aptitude from student to student is impossible to reconcile with the overarching notions of universal equality.

All housing, food, utilities and property is provided by, and dictated by, the various departments of the state, who ensure that no individual member of the lower tier of society has anything more or less than their neighbor. Likewise, actual income is nonexistent. The wage for work (which for many citizens is 70 to 80 hours a week), regardless of what your assigned career is, is the standard living-provision offered by the government.

Career-assignment is one of the few ways the lives of individual citizens differ from that of their neighbor. With the deemphasizing of individuality and difference in skill between citizens, there is almost no attempt by the world-government to assign citizens to jobs they might perform best at or have a natural affinity for. Instead, careers are assigned to citizens almost exclusively based on a combination of what is needed at a given time by society and completely random mathematical selection. Whether working in agriculture to produce the food that all citizens will need for their rations or mining the coal that provides the power for urban collectives, or maintaining the utilities of power, ration-delivery and sewage that all citizens rely on, to aiding with the tremendous amount of record-keeping and paperwork involved in the government overseeing such a complex and involved societal structure, there is more than enough work for citizens in the Bergeron-5 universe. The physical structure of urban development as dictated by the world-government is very dense and compact. Civilization has been reorganized to occupy a much smaller total land-mass in much denser city structures. Citizens reside almost exclusively in prefabricated blocks of housing designed to hold a large total number of citizens, each with their own apartment-like dwelling space (all identical in order to ensure equality, of course). The megacities are bordered by wall-like barriers, almost similar to the defenses of a town in the middle ages, adding to the insular and self-contained sense of society. The purpose of these barriers as dictated by the government, if anything other than for the psychological effect is currently unknown since things like warfare or invasion obviously would no longer be a general threat in this universe. Concentrating all citizens into dense urban areas has resulted in suburban and rural areas in various countries becoming almost totally depopulated. Outside the walls of the megacities, large swaths of rural lands in America, Europe, China, Japan, Russia and Australia are completely uninhabited, often hosting decaying, eerily quiet ghost-towns of former communities.

That All Men Are Dictated Equal
The Equality Enforcement Office, arguably the single most powerful branch of the world-government, holds almost complete sway over the lives of all citizens that aren’t government overseers. As its name implies, they use this power to enforce “equality”, often to a shockingly brutal degree.

For example, members of society determined to be too physically strong (compared to an “average” that the EEO determines for its citizens, which is almost consistently low-balled) are forced to wear non-removable prosthetics over their limbs that are burdened with heavy weights so as to compensate for their physical abilities. Similar non-removable prosthetics exist for people determined by the government to be too swift, too dexterous or too agile, for example, to hamper their abilities as well, or rather, to “equalize” them with the rest of society. Mandatory sessions of testing with the EEO are performed with every citizen on a frequent basis over the course of their life to determine their abilities and to then prescribe treatments and handicaps, from childhood to old age.

The capacities tested and “corrected” by the EEO are not just limited to athletic abilities, and their prescriptions for people who are gifted in other areas are often even more unnatural and frightening. Individuals determined to have exceptional intelligence are often prescribed mandatory “Dampeners”, a common nickname for prescription drugs that contain neurologically-inhibiting chemicals. These drugs create an inebriating effect, artificially lowering that individual’s capacity for complex thought and keeping them in a psychologically distant and unproductive funk (similar to the effects of alcohol or the negative side-effects of anti-psychotic medicine, for example). While not advertised to the public, the current belief by medical professionals within the EEO is that long-term use of Dampeners will result in steady neurological damage, ultimately lowering that person’s IQ permanently and thus achieving the goal of a more permanent equality. The EEO also appears to have experimented with the idea of perfecting a procedural lobotomy for use in the future of especially gifted individuals (as evidenced by a secret population of prisoners that are now brain-damaged, brain-dead, comatose or outright deceased after undergoing a failed attempt at perfecting this procedure).

The push for total social equality extends even to what we would consider nebulous or subjective qualities. Individuals considered to be “too attractive” (as determined by an algorithm based on psychological studies designed to determine the mathematical formula for the size and placement of facial-features as to be of ideal desirability according to the largest number of people) may be forced to wear non-removable masks that conceal their natural features. The masks are designed to not inhibit functions like talking, eating or sleeping, but the concept of comfort for the wearer may have been sacrificed depending on who you ask. The burgeoning technology of plastic surgery threatens to potentially make the EEO’s mandates regarding equality in physical beauty much more permanent.

Failure to conform to the EEO’s prescriptions, such as unlawful removal of prosthetics or failing to take scheduled dose of medication, are considered crimes against society and subject to surprisingly severe punishments implemented by the government offices.

The Race to End Race
The EEO also seems to have made the concept of human genetic diversity a target of eventual extinction via their programs. Like nearly all other aspects of life for citizens, sex and reproduction in this society are totally controlled by the government. Any sexual interaction between citizens that isn’t prescribed and authorized by the government is expressly forbidden. If citizens are selected for “reproductive responsibility” (which is rare, because the various branches of government are apparently in a campaign to reduce the world’s overall population even further), it is only with a partner that is determined by the government. The pairings selected by the government are almost exclusively pairs of people that are of differing races, with selection usually choosing individuals with the greatest genetic racial difference possible. While this program has only existed for one generation so far since the new world order that created this dystopia was put into place, the apparent goal of this campaign is to eventually eliminate the entire concept of human race and racial difference through interbreeding over the course of many generations. Having determined that racial differences are one of the most active components that lead to inequality, strife and prejudice in society, the objective is to eventually fashion the entirety of humanity into one single mono-racial block. Unauthorized sexual contact between citizens, especially between citizens of the same race, is considered a “crime against the equality of the future through sexual violence” and subject to some of the government’s harshest punishments.

With the numerical disparity between many races seen in our universe, the theoretical task of the eventual elimination of different races would be extremely difficult on a mathematical level (with Asian ethnicities vastly outnumbering Native American ethnicities, for example). However, in the world of Bergeron-5 this may be less of an obstacle for the government in the future. While there are still disparities between races as far as what percentage of the population they represent, Asian, East-Indian and East-European ethnicities are significantly lower in number than would be expected. This has lead to rumors and concerns among the Infinity Patrol research staff that in this universe’s recent past there may have been some sort of campaign of depopulation, or even genocide, targeted at those races to bring them down to a more manageable number for the government.

Attempts at Normalcy
Despite the oppressive and bizarre practices forced on society by the world government in this parallel, the society engineered here attempts to retain familiar aspects of former human society that existed before the rise of the world-state. Citizens are still, surprisingly enough, allowed to commune, patronize businesses and seek leisure (if you can call what is allowed to be done in this society any of those things), albeit while under constant government surveillance and while wearing grotesquely unnatural instruments of “equalization”.

Guaranteed equal income allows for no envy to exist between “rich” and “poor”, so some citizens are allowed (or rather assigned by the government) to open shops and businesses that offer goods and services that other citizens can actually choose to purchase or not, rather than it being allotted to them by the government. This grain of free and vaguely capitalist exchange is, of course, heavily monitored and regimented by the government. Goods and services offered are, as one would predict, hideously meager. Poorly-rolled cigarettes, acidic and bitter-tasting alcohol, copies of government-approved literature, dull, brittle razor blades and other mundane wares are available for exchange for a citizen’s tiny amount of government-allotted spending money. Even in this endeavor, however, citizens can be subject to heavy-handed penalization. A citizen smart enough to start stockpiling goods for later use or shrewdly handling their money through thrift and thusly gradually saving it up can be punished for “Hoarding the Wealth” if their “hoard” grows big enough to be noticed by government surveillance, which will then be confiscated and redistributed.

Parks and libraries exist to be utilized by citizens as well, and all as just as depressing as one would expect. The image of such places being utilized by citizens is considered one of the more eerie and unnatural images of an alternate Earth witnessed by many Infinity Patrol members, as people mill about wearing hideously limiting prosthetics and masks or under the influence of drug-induced stupors doing their best to look like they are enjoying themselves.

The world-government is even trying to utilize modern mass media in the form of television broadcasting in order to promote their societies’ ideals. With every domicile featuring an in-built television screen, citizens can tune-in to the broadcasts being made for one and a half to two hours a day (if they aren’t working during the broadcast time, that is) of carefully engineered government programming. Aside from its obvious use for propagandist speeches and ceremonies presented by officials, the government also creates programs that are an unnerving attempt to recreate cultural facets of old and make them in line with their modern morals. Theater performances are broadcast live (all featuring a cast made of completely equal numbers of all races, ethnicities and sexes as to create completely equal representation), such as plays telling moralistic fables that portray the supposedly dystopian society before the rise of the world-state compared to the utopia the world-state created, or ballets with the dancers wearing unsettling masks and struggling to stay in fluid motion while wearing weighty or cumbersome prosthetics.

With religions like Christianity and Islam being blamed as some of the biggest instigators of inequality in the old world (Hinduism itself containing, of all things, a caste system), religion largely has no place in this new world according to the government. Those that still remember the religious traditions of the old world that are caught still practicing such supposedly oppressive vestiges of former societies can be charged with “hate crimes” of the highest order. Nevertheless, the world-government has experimented with instituting a sort of approved world-religion. This new religion is vague, ill-defined and only ambiguously spiritual/supernatural, and its attempted implementation into society by the government offices has been disorganized and incompetent like most of their other projects. Citizens are selected for mandatory participation in showy rituals and displays that are both attended live and broadcast on government television. The most iconic of these rituals has citizens parade around a giant wire-mesh figure, coating it at various heights with large lengths of fabric that give the figure a more visible shape as more fabric is added. The figure is an androgynous, raceless humanoid figure with undefined, blob-like limbs, supposedly representing the societal collective that all citizens are paying tribute to.

The Men (and the Equal Number of Women) That Weigh the Scales
The actual members of the various government departments like the EEO function with the bare minimum of actual in-person interaction with the members of society they control the lives of. Most of the state’s orchestrating is done distantly or by proxy through employees of the state. The distance between citizens and the ruling offices of government helps to ease the cognitive dissonance resulting from the fact that members of the government are largely not required to subject themselves to the horrific “equalizing” procedures that average citizens are required to receive. On paper, this exception is allowed due to “our leaders needing all of their abilities unfettered in order to guide us as best they can” with the promise that they will be “made equal” with the citizenry when not acting in office. In reality, this is just a generous perk of being part of the governmental ruling class that privileges those in power over those under their power. As with so many dystopian parallel worlds, positions of power are an excuse for the hypocritical shirking of system that those in power themselves claim is good for all.

The Costs of Equality
The generally poor education-system that is more concerned with indoctrination and keeping all citizens equally uninformed, as well as the lack of emphasis that the world-government places on the skills of individuals and the cultivation of specific talents has resulted in many problems for the world-government of Bergeron-5. This system often results in under-qualified and incompetent individuals being placed in jobs critical to a city’s functions. The cities of Bergeron-5 are routinely plagued by power-outages, sewage problems, confusions in logistic processes and costly construction errors, with the ruling offices scrambling to fix the problems and keep society on track. It’s not uncommon for a sector of housing to have to go days or even weeks without power, water, sewer-usage, clean clothes or adequate amounts of food rations. Due to the complete control of the government over all spheres of science, research and business, as well as the outright suppression of naturally superior intelligences, the world of Bergeron-5 has been significantly technologically stunted. With a few exceptions of technology that developed as a handy means of the government maintaining social order such as the electronics that are useful for surveillance systems and computerized record-keeping, most technology present in Bergeron-5 is more on par with our universe’s mid-to-late 1930’s rather than the Current Year of 1962. Due to the lack of more efficient technologies and a lack of interest on the part of the government, environmental pollution is significantly worse than it would be otherwise. The government-owned industry designed to provide for countless citizens of the world-state generates tremendous amounts of water and air pollution which are not even a minor concern to the powers that be. Government-provided electricity still primarily comes from the burning of coal, and the manufacturing processes used to make the meager goods that allow society of function are woefully outdated, wasteful and pollutant-heavy. The structure of the cities in Bergeron-5’s new world order are incredibly dense population-wise and fairly insular in design, with no exposure to the world outside a citizen’s city being allowed. This has kept the growingly concerning toll on the environment out of the notice of any citizen smart enough to care about it. However, with the exponential worsening of the environment, pollution and its ill effects are beginning to creep into the lives of people in the urban environments.

The equally impoverished level of sophistication in the area of medical science leaves the world-government ill prepared to properly care for the rapidly growing number of citizens affected by health problems created by air-contamination, water-contamination and overly dense population concentration. In addition to sickness due to pollution, the rapid spread of biological contagions in the urban structure is a rising concern. Several outbreaks of fairly lethal diseases have happened in the past (including diseases like Typhus, Pneumococcal Disease and Pertussis, none of which have been cured yet in this universe), but were successfully contained, but the looming threat of a total pandemic that spreads and kills too fast to be quarantined is a major concern for the ruling offices.

The greatest threat to social stability in this parallel, however, may come from the citizens themselves. The shoddy maintenance of the ubiquitous surveillance and the general incompetent nature of the government have allowed even this exceptionally regimented society to allow malcontents to briefly meet in private and sow the seeds of a possible future revolt. While physically and legally unable to remove their various “equalizing” prosthetics, and subjected to indoctrination by the state for their entire life, Bergeron-5 has inevitably and understandably bred individuals that are questioning the oppressive, failing system they are a part of and want to change it. With so many citizens wholly indoctrinated and loyal to the world-government, however, this is an extremely risky endeavor, as reporting on individuals that pose a threat to this supposed utopia is one of the most lauded and demanded duties as prescribed by the ruling offices, and threats to their mandated equality are not treated kindly.