THE SEVENTEENTH BOX
A man died…
and arrived at the gates of Heaven carrying seventeen boxes full of conspiracy.
He dragged them across the stone,
one after another,
until all seventeen sat before God.
One toppled over.
Papers scattered everywhere.
God looked at the boxes.
Then at the man.
Then back at the boxes.
“What’s all this?”
“Proof,” said the man.
He paused.
“I finally figured out the conspiracy behind the evil cabal running the Earth.”
God was silent for a moment.
Then…
“Go on.” God said.
“It started with the bankers!” The man exclaimed.
“Naturally.” God replied with exhausted breath.
“They trapped everyone in debt.”
“And who borrowed the money?” God asked.
The man hesitated.
“Well…
we did.” The man replied.
He opened another box.
“But the corporations made us want things.”
“And who bought them?” God asked.
“We did.” The man replied.
And another box.
“Governments wanted power.” The man explained.
“And who gave it to them?” God asked with his brow raised.
“We did.” The man said hesitantly.
The man opened another box.
“The media manipulated our attention.”
“And who kept watching?”
The man paused.
“We did.”
He opened another.
“The algorithms learned how to control us.”
“And who trained them?” God asked.
The man paused was considerably longer.
“We did.”
The man stared suspiciously at God.
For one brief moment, the light came on in the man’s weary eyes.
Then…
it slowly dimmed.
“Okay,” the man said as he began to question himself. “But somebody designed a system where greed creates scarcity… fear creates control… control creates rebellion… rebellion creates new rulers…
and eventually everybody ends up exactly where they started.”
God smiled.
The man opened the seventeenth box.
And inside…
was his master thesis on a murder board.
Maps.
Photographs.
Bank records.
Wars.
Empires.
Corporations.
Governments.
Revolutions.
Religious institutions.
Secret societies.
And enough red string to strangle history itself.
God pulled up a chair.
The man began.
“The bankers fund the governments.”
He pointed at a pin on the board, and the another connected with red string.
“Governments protect the corporations.”
“Corporations influence the media.”
“The media influence the people.”
“The people elect the governments.”
“And the governments…”
He followed the red string back to where he had started.
“…borrow from the bankers.”
God nodded.
“And?”
The man stared at the map.
“It just loops.”
“I see.”
“And it goes back farther,” the man said.
He began digging further into the seventeenth box.
“Rome did it.”
“Babylon did it.”
“Egypt did it.”
“Kingdoms rise.”
“Wealth and power concentrate.”
“Institutions become corrupt.”
“People become oppressed.”
“And… eventually everything collapses…
and somebody else takes over.”
“Keep going.”
So the man dug deeper.
Beneath modern maps were older ones.
Different kingdoms.
Different currencies.
Different gods.
Different rulers.
Same red string connecting.
His excitement began to fade.
“This has been happening…
forever.”
God raised his browse.
“From the beginning.” God corrected the man.
The man lifted the final layer of recorded history.
And there, at the very bottom of the seventeenth box…
was a Bible.
He looked at God.
“You put that there?”
“You brought it.” God said.
“I did?”
“You just never dug deep enough.”
The man opened the Bible.
God pointed to a passage.
The man read aloud.
“The borrower is servant to the lender.”
His face lit up.
“Exactly! It’s the lenders!” The man exclaimed.
God quietly turned the page and pointed to another passage.
The man read again.
“You cannot serve God and mammon.”
He stopped.
“That one’s about the rich.”
God said nothing and opened another page.
The man reluctantly continued.
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
He turned the page.
“You shall not covet.”
Another page.
“Whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap.”
Another.
“Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye…
but do not notice the log in your own?”
Silence.
The man became considerably less enthusiastic about his conspiracy theory.
He looked back at his murder board.
Every string pointed toward somebody and something else.
Bankers.
Politicians.
Corporations.
Kings.
Priests.
Neighbors.
Enemies.
God picked up a string and thumb tack.
Slowly…
He drawing one final connection.
Landing on an image of the man.
The man stared at it.
“Oh.”
God nodded.
The man looked at the map again.
Then at himself.
Then at God.
“Oooooh.”
And, for the first time…
the conspiracy map made sense.
The borrower could become enslaved to consumption.
The lender…
to accumulation.
The ruler…
to power.
The citizen…
to fear.
The famous…
to attention.
And the righteous…
to being right.
Different masters.
Same bargain.
The man looked back through history.
People accumulated until others had too little.
Borrowed until they owed what they could not repay.
Sought power to protect themselves from powerful people.
The oppressed became rulers.
The rulers became oppressors.
Empires collapsed.
New empires appeared.
Everyone blamed the person at the other end of the string.
And every generation opened the same ancient book…
and somehow identified themselves as outside of it.
The man looked at God.
“You’ve been telling us this the whole time.”
“Yes.”
“And we turned the warnings into stories about everybody else.”
“Man is remarkably gifted at storytelling.”
The man winced.
“So when we refuse to see our own part…”
“You repeat it.”
The man looked back across history.
“Debt.
War.
Empires.
Revolutions.
Collapse.”
He looked again at the Bible.
“Prophecy shows us where the path leads.”
God smiled with an all knowing smile.
“And yet you keep walking down it…
to see if the destination has changed.”
The man laughed quietly to himself.
Not because it was particularly funny.
But because it was.
He looked again at the Bible.
Then at seventeen boxes containing several thousand years of evidence that humanity had somehow written itself out of its own story.
God smiled.
Far below them was Earth.
Eight billion people…
pointing at one another.
The man watched them for a while.
“So how do we escape the cycle?”
God pointed toward the Bible.
“I have to read it again?” The man asked wearily.
“No.”
“This time…
put yourself in the story.”
The man fell silent.
The seventeenth box remained open.
And, for once…
so did the man.
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