In the summer of the Pandemic/ Riot Year of 2020, in a land of masked fear, the author found the Enchiridion [handbook] of Epictetus [Acquired-property], the ancient stoic philosopher born a slave in an empire built on the enslavement of his race. By the 5th of 51passages, it became obvious that the ancient cripple, his leg broken by a cruel master or born lame [the sources disagree] knew more of 21st Century America than anyone currently living in it. The Giver is a postmodern resident alien’s impressions of the Stoicism of Epictetus as an ancient mirror on Modern Man’s troubled plight.

Shamdemicism is the social science recently elevated above us as a self-ruling template for social compliance, in which the fear of disease is used to terrify humans into levels of obedience to a malevolent system that has previously only been achieved through universalist religious fanaticism and ideological industrial tyranny. Finally, the tattered yet still grinding engines of the systems of coercion developed in the Agrarian and Industrial Ages, have been joined with a system of control specifically adapted to the Information Age. How might this new paradigm of control offer benefits and perils specific to the plight of the alienated [1] mind?

Written entirely off line from 5/8/2020 through 5/15/20

18 years ago I trained with an African nationalist named Ben N’du, who taught himself how to read Egyptian Hieroglyphics. To Ben, everything Egyptian was Bantu African. Yesterday, as the misty rain covered my illegal entry into Murderland, I realized, that as I entered this Baltimore death factory, where people cower in fear of their Black God of Death, in his more than 300 annual manifestations, that I was, in the a very real sense sneaking through the Gates of Anubis, the black, jackal-headed god of the afterlife, for Fascist Population Zone of Maryland and its moral well of despair, Baltimore, now reside in an explicitly post-human phase of Western Civilization. And here I am, skulking in its long shadows, under a wintery May sky, in a land of fear and fright, in which no man seems to possess within his mind any shred of might.

James LaFond, May 9, 2020

In June 2020 the War against Humanity by the American System of Control, was decisively resolved in favor of hive domestication over human expansion into space. The coffin lid of humanity’s hope to escape the gravity and morality well known as Earth, was nailed shut with the ascension of Modernity’s lowest common denominator to demigod status.

Now that the visionary Majority Reports of H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, David Brinn, Gene Wolfe, Robert H. Heinlein, Larry Niven, Hal Clement, C.S. Lewis, Jerry Pournelle, Greg Baer, Poul Anderson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, L. Ron Hubbard, Leigh Bracket, Ray Bradbury, Gene Rodenberry, Frederick Pohl, Arthur C. Clarke and other of science-fiction’s brightest lights have been dashed; and instead the Minority Reports of Jack London, Robert E. Howard, Audous Huxley, George Orwell and Phillip K. Dick have actually come true, America’s least known and most reviled science-fiction writer, an actual homeless man, begins his autopsy of the depraved American psyche.

The author, a homeless man, spent nearly a week of the High Summer of 2020 drifting around Maryland and Virginia, during the low winter in the life of the dying society which had hated and tormented him since 1968, when he was first beaten by his metazoological kin for the conjoined crimes of being freckled and alone. As various men and women, hunted and hated by the emerging Mob Mind, provided assistance and lodging and alternately shunned him as a liability, the author has recorded his impressions of a dying society cast into darkness by the lengthening shadow of an ominous piety.

As the cruelest age since 1618-1648 ravenously rises from the terrible incubus of self-hate, bathed in the amniotic waste of gloried sloth, the ostracized ciphers of the remnant American Mind might feel despair. But the author, hated and alone since emerging from toddlerhood, finds Hope with the return of Reality, seeking a path through the 3,000-mile Lie he was born slave to, as the false pillars of a 200-year Utopia sinks into yawning Dystopia and the way between offers the way-finder a thread betwixt the baying mob and the lingering and cuckold dead.