Sord in Prosperity - Hope Beyond the Apocalypse

EP. 134 - ANTONIN

SORD'S FATHER ANTONIN WAS a physics professor at Durango's university and a lead researcher at Prosperity's Institute of Science. The Institute was a catch-all attempt by the young nation-state to establish a modest resurgence of scientific research.

In the previous few decades, none of the settlements of humans that evolved from the wreckage of GDII possessed adequately trained personnel or funding resources to resurrect anything like the degree of research that existed prior to the devastation. Prosperity's Institute was a start.

Antonin's parents, both of whom had just graduated law school in 2075, the year of GDII, named him after their least favorite Supreme Court Justice in United States history, one whom they felt greatly contributed to the erosion of the country's social fabric.

For them, giving their son his name was a joke of sorts, a poke and prod at the presumptuous nature of human belief systems. At religious dogma and entitlement. At the presumed separation of church and state. At arrogance and hubris.

Inherent to the original's Antonin's construct of jurisprudence was his presumption that the Constitutional framers were faultless. It was a belief that the revered document's doctrine, no matter how old, could withstand every test of time without ever adapting to the evolving circumstances of humanity. This belief system was adhered to even more rigidly as the doctrine's underpinnings started to evaporate from the constant pressure of pervasively advancing, corrupting technologies.

Prosperity's historians often argued about when American society started showing the signs of an irreversible deterioration. Similar to all societal failures in history, the smallest things, innocuous and slight, eventually gnawed at the basic principles of fairness intended in the underlying doctrines.

Antonin was one of the Justices who ardently supported the Citizens United case, a decision that greatly enabled the country's politics to be overtly influenced and substantially guided by the proto-oligarchs of the early twenty-first century. This landmark ruling allowed the few in society with extreme wealth, often imbued with extremist religious, Randian, or Social Darwinist belief systems, to more readily integrate their belief constructs and self-profiting advantages into governmental policy via corporate structures. As a result, the ethics of fairness, kindness, and consideration in the once great nation were further subjugated for the benefit of the few.

Antonin was an ardent promoter and benefactor of a cult of self-proclaimed Constitutional purists that arose and prospered starting in the mid-twentieth century. They prophesied that by placing the founders upon godhead pedestals, by elevating these inviolable and wise beings as faultless and everlasting visionaries, the justice system could achieve a magical and most righteous consistency in the application of law for future ages.

The purist judges and justices only had one requirement: to impregnate themselves into the minds of their long-dead, irreproachable founders. By doing so, by strictly adhering to their blessed words, they could achieve a full and comprehensive vision of their sainted founders, thus preventing their personal biases from influencing the interpretation of laws and legal intent.

To the simpletons, this originalist, textualist philosophy seemed perfectly sensible. Why allow all that you had learned during your life to taint the sacred scrolls? Why allow your own belief constructs to influence the nature and intent of established law? As with most political obfuscations, however, this cultist dogma provided the perfect smokescreen for those who wished to inject their personal beliefs into every critical legal and ultimately societal decision.

With this simplistic approach, every decision could now be enshrined and embalmed as 'the will of the founders,' and the cultists were simply interpreting that will. Unbiased. Stripped bare of their own belief systems or predispositions. It would become purity, goodness, and virtue arrayed in the shining glow of righteous innocence.