North Vs. South: The Story of H-25
A computer program that solves all of our problems is forgotten in plain sight
I
Once upon a time, there was a land split into two nations: the North, and the South, who’s feud started with H-25.
A long long time ago, a mysterious C++ program emerged in the South, which we call H-25. On a purely technical level, H-25 baffled the best software engineers across the land. It was an unmatched marvel of programming skill. Its code was incredibly concise, yet highly readable. It utilized as-of-then unheard of data structures that blew all the others out of the water. It operated with inhuman efficiency — H-25’s memory management and control flow was as though each byte was being moved with exact purpose. And to top it all off it was bug free.
The program was brought forth by a Southerner, who claimed it to be from God. The reality of this was at least obvious to the software engineers, especially given the fact that this man couldn’t code. It was from God.
But the rulers of all the different nations would die on their thrones before accepting that.
To understand why, I have to tell you what H-25 does. When compiled and executed on a supercomputer (it needs a lot of processing power to get it at full capacity), H-25 outputs laws.
You see, legislation is a matter of tremendous consequence: getting it right will ensure justice, peace and prosperity, while getting it wrong results in oppression and backwardness. And it’s really hard to get right — almost impossible actually. So out of love for his creation, God sent the nations a computer program that would do all of the legislation for them perfectly.
What should our taxes be? H-25 will compute the answer. What are the rights and responsibilities of the husband and the wife when they get divorced? H-25 will compute the answer. Where can we allocate state funds? H-25 will compute the answer. What should our response be to this treaty? H-25 will compute the answer. From economics to education to foreign policy to domestic disputes and beyond, H-25 has answers to any queries about what the law should be.
And you know what? It worked. The South — just a small village at the time —realized that H-25 was divine, and they started running it on their supercomputers. Their rulers would then take the output laws and enact them on every issue in their nation. Anytime an issue arose, the nation’s supercomputers were set to run H-25 on that input. Whereas every other nation was still getting their laws from men, the South was getting its laws from H-25.
And while other nations were suffering in the throes of poverty, crime, famine, civil war, and all around backwardness, the South under H-25 rose to unforeseeable heights. GDP was so high that the state ended poverty. Every southerner had free education and healthcare. Crime rates were the lowest they’d ever been. The South became the undisputed leader in scientific progress, in fields like medicine, mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Politically, the South would go to conquer the two biggest empires of its time — the East and the West — in victories that shocked the whole world. The Southern nation was not united by race, ethnicity, language, nor even nationalism — but only by their mutual belief in H-25 as the source for all law.
If the code itself wasn’t convincing enough, the proof of H-25 was in the pudding. The successes it produced were unprecedented. This more than anything else spread belief in H-25 across the lands. Nevertheless, the tyrants of the other lands refused to run H-25 out of arrogance, and continued running their dominions into the ground with their unjust legislation. It was up to the South to liberate the people of the lands from the oppressive laws they were under and let them taste the sweetness of H-25.
And that they did. For a very long time, they reigned as the world’s foremost superpower. But, that didn’t last forever.
II
Eventually — and I’m skipping a lot of history here — the South began to stagnate. While the reasons are many, I’ll take the moment to recount one: the South stopped building supercomputers. They got to a point where they’d run H-25 so many times on so many inputs, they figured they already had all the laws they needed. Which, of course, left them without the ability to make use of H-25 when, inevitably, new questions came up.
Now the North, having been dominated by the South for centuries, took this opportunity to attack. But they weren’t just out to conquer the South: they wanted to make sure their supremacy can never be challenged by the South again.
That of course meant that they would have to “neuter” H-25, the South’s secret weapon. They’ve seen the power it gave the South in their golden ages, so they were intent on making sure the South never got that power again. They couldn’t actually get rid of it as a software — it’s open source — nor could they ever going to get Southerners to wholesale disbelieve in its divine source. What they needed to do is remove it from it’s role as a source of law.
Which is what they did. The North launched a full scale invasion of the south, which they won handily. They replaced the rulers with their own puppets and then officially banned the usage of H-25 for legislation. For good measure, they even banned C++ for a time, the language H-25 was coded in.
III
And so, the South was humiliated like it had never been before. The North split their territory up into dozens of states. Their princes, none of them running H-25, are a combination of Northern puppets and self-interested tyrants. All of this has caused the South to go from the most elite civilization in the lands to the most downtrodden: poverty, civil war, crime, and overall degradation was their new normal.
But the North and her puppets still had a problem. Even though H-25 was removed from its legislative role, people still believed in it firmly, and outright de-conversion wasn’t going to work. So instead, the nature of the belief in H-25 had to be managed, and the full apparatus of state media and education would have to be leveraged to do so.
Specifically, the goal was to individualize the way people thought about H-25; instead of thinking of it as a program that computes the best laws for society, it’s a program that computes the best “laws” for you.
It’s a sly move, but it worked. You see, some laws require implementation for compliance to exist — for example, you cannot comply with a mandatory military service law without a military to report to. But other laws don’t. You could load up H-25 and ask it something like, “What speed should we go on the highway?”, and it’ll output the law, “<=120km/h
”. It’s perfectly possible to follow this “law” without it existing in law. So all the anti-H-25 forces had to do is blur the line between implementation and compliance, until your average Southerner thought himself implementing H-25 because he drives <=120km/h. In reality, implementation would necessitate enforcement of the speed limit on all drivers.
How about the first kind, where implementation is required for compliance? There’s a similar trick. They’ll tell you that the law only applies to you when its prerequisites are satisfied (e.g, when there is a military for you to serve in) — which, as a question of compliance, is technically true! But the implementation of the law would still necessitate bringing into existence its prerequisites— i.e, the military in this case. Thus, the question of whether or not you can comply with the law is irrelevant to the fact that the law is still not being implemented. Unfortunately for many, absolving of compliance was a red enough herring for them to forget about the question of implementation.
When these understandings are mass-consumed by the South, the result is that the output of H-25 is no longer understood as law, even though its outputs are always laws. When a Southerner asks H-25 “What are we to do on Wednesday?”, and it answers with “avoid dairy
”, this is understood by him as a personal obligation at best. In the days of implementation, however, this would’ve been understood as a law, i.e. as a dairy restriction to be enforced on the whole society (which is stronger than mere personal obligation). This is the difference between a law and a suggestion: society doesn’t have a choice when it comes to obeying or disobeying a law.
IV
And so, in the face of seemingly insurmountable subjugation, many of the Southerners were content to busy themselves with compliance to laws that weren’t being implemented.
H-25 would continue to be revered by them as God’s divine code. Southern parents would send their children to memorize the source code, as they did in the old days. People continued to learn C++ so they could better understand the divine miracle. Most would load it on their personal computers and run inputs on it from time-to-time. Some people spend their lives stepping through the code.
But the whole idea of what H-25 came to do — replace human legislation with perfect ones to create justice — is mostly forgotten. The only thing no one is doing with H-25 is using it for its original purpose. Their defeat wasn’t just a physical one, but an intellectual one. Against all logic, the miraculous software was not being used, and most Southerners don’t see it.
So if you’re of the few Southerners that still sees it — glad tidings to a fellow stranger.
Excellent. There is no such thing as apolitical Islam. The idea that spiritual and legislative matters should not overlap is a very western, liberal meme that is so pervasive that trying to describe a world without it is like trying to describe air to a fish.