Much to Undo

A motley group of misfits entered the quiet old town: a carnival barker, a priest, a fool, and a used car salesman. They were selling progress packaged as the ideal society made of ideal formed humans of fantastical beliefs, a type of perfection all the rage in large cities, in need of being brought to remote placid locations to make all lives better in the new style.

There were several structural changes needed to make progress fit. Schools would no longer educate for traditional skills, knowledge, and critical reasoning, but instead will teach social justice to tell people they are identical and success was about luck. Therefore they should be kind, accepting, and tolerant of bad outcomes, quietly encouraging blame, covetousness, and other failures of character. Someone else will have to pay for their proliferate consequences.

Crooked leaders will loudly attract attention to captivate with a compelling vision of a world that doesn't exist and is probably not desirable, though the fiction makes some feel good and demand what charlatans tell them they deserve. Entertainment and media will join in to push and pull, corrupting consciousness with delicious images and narcotic chimeras.

Bitter adults will be inspired to mutter about secret conspiracies keeping them from being equal and possessing what they see others have. Cultivated envy will encourage people to dislike the organized and active, and many will want to rage in frustration to destroy the decent parts of society so everything can be ravaged equally into useless rubble wrecked of potential.

Decline and disarray created by politicians makes opportunities for new political solutions. Additional laws and initiatives are forced on the people, paid for with money they earned. Self-sufficient farming communities and developed societies are in need of more Moroccans and will receive many more to make things better through more division and decline.

The scam artists quickly set up shop, preached their message, promoted their need for generous donations to perform their important work, got politicians on their side for favorable access and corporations eager to cut corners with cheap labor hiding costs pushed elsewhere, spurred graft and outright fraud, and entangled themselves into the infrastructure, which eventually led to their undoing as people began questioning why everything they touched became qualitatively worse and degraded, though was officially sanctioned as the utopia of the future no one wanted or needed.

The selfless purveyors of progress then bailed when things got hairy, moving to the next opportunistic target, leaving an eyesore and tremendous damage in their wake. There was much to clean up until the people could get back to where they used to be before the big predation.