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By Root 1586 0

with economics were poorly understood by the great majority of practitioners in either field. The fusion of the two disciplines pioneered by Garrett Hardin had yet to win wide acceptance at the beginning of the twenty-first century, partly because there were few individuals or corporations who had anything substantial to gain from accepting it. Men were mortal then, and few had sufficient imagination even to anticipate the changes and challenges they would have to face within a limited lifetime. From its earliest embryonic days, however, the Universal Cartel had every reason to take aboard the crucial lesson set out in the most significant scientific parable of the twentieth century, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Nobody now remembers who coined the term “Hardinist Cabal” — it was not Adam Zimmerman — but it was a notion whose time had certainly come.

As soon as its formation was begun, the Universal Cartel had no alternative but to accept as its primary purpose and objective the management and control of the inevitable ecocatastrophic Crash, with a view to steering its course to the only imaginable healthy outcome. Among the many advisers and consultants hired to help them organize and discipline the world economy, Adam Zimmerman was one whose understanding of that necessity, and the means to attain it, stood out very conspicuously. He was, therefore, in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to further their strategy and his own, in near-perfect harmony.

Four

Adam was not in the least surprised that he became known, in the years before he absented himself from the twenty-first century, as “the man who stole the world.” He did not resent the appellation; indeed, he was very proud of it.

“The world had to be stolen,” he told me, by way of explanation. “In exactly the same way that the ancient commons of England needed enclosure and usurpation, so the entire surface of the Earth had to be enclosed within tight bonds of ownership, in order that its resources and productivity might be sensibly controlled.”

“Was there no other way?” I asked.

“None,” he said, adamantly. “The users of the land could not be allowed to continue exploiting it competitively, each to his individual advantage, and they certainly could not be trusted to exercise restraint within the framework of any voluntary agreement. A firm ruling hand was necessary. The long-term needs of the Commonweal had to be substituted for the short-term ambitions of individual greed. Political communism had attempted to do that, but it had failed in spectacular fashion to contain or constrain the urgings of envy and avarice.”

“Was there no intermediate course that might have been plotted between the two extremes?”

“No. The objective could only be attained by an approach from a diametrically opposite direction. Consumer demand could only be controlled by its makers and organizers; social and technological progress could only be subjected to managerial control by people who understood management theory as well as scientific theory. Whatever moral reservations the people of my era may have had as to capitalism’s disregard for social justice and equality of opportunity, the greater need had to be served.

“Big business already ruled the world — the only question was whether it could get its act together in time to do the job properly. The world’s property was distributed far too widely and indiscriminately, but most of the people who had pocketed it were living on the economic edge, waiting negligently to be pushed over. The people who knew what they were doing, and what still needed to be done, already had the lion’s share of the wealth and control of the markets. They were the people who had to steal the rest, because they were the people who could.

“The people who were destined to own the world were already well on the way to that goal in 2000, but they needed to accelerate the process if they were to complete the grab while the world was still worth stealing. I helped them obtain that extra boost. It was simple enough — the 1929 example was in all the