Empiricism

The crowd was enormous. Much larger than the great gatherings you had got used to in the past and learnt to ignore. And the cause had not been thought of before.The demonstration had suddenly developed out of nothing and was still growing, nobody could say how. And nobody tried.He was in a group standing out from the rest of the crowd, without anybody having noticed that. Standing there engulfed by the silence he would not have noticed himself either, if his feet had not begun to feel cold as if an icecold wind was blowing beneath him.As he looked down he felt a slight catch at the back of his head, but it was not until much later he clearly understood what he had seen.Inside the government building it dawned very slowly on the 347 men and women who were the lawmakers of the land. But when the panic broke through it sounded like a scream: »The voters are speaking!«At that moment time came to a standstill.From the beginning he had been slow in grasping new trends. Phlegmatic, inattentive, indolent – words came cheaply, they were used generously – he lacked the ability of keeping pace, of being up to date.And when he finally realized that himself, he tried desperately to keep pace. He was bound to fail. The only logical outcome of his enthusiasm was that everything around him accelerated, all he achieved was to become a negative indicator of the ever changing trends: When with a burning heart he was advocating a viewpoint or trying to catch the trend, everybody knew that it was outmoded.Later, after many years when the will for democracy in the masses had grown – indeed, democracy almost became modern – he tried to mark a ballot paper with a cross, and they quit holding ballots and introduced changing representative segments of the population of nine hundred sixty seven persons to appoint the government of the country and to lay down the lines of policy.You might say that he should have foreseen this, but obviously, he was far to bound to his destiny.Only when he was standing in the crowd in front of the government building did he slowly begin to realize the futility of his attempts.And when he finally accepted only being an appendix to developments, everything ground to a standstill.They were sitting. Quite literally. And when the three hundred and forty seven governing politicians were not sitting in the governmental hall they held meetings with the opinions makers. Nobody knew who those were, but everybody knew they existed. Or guessed if from the outcome.And the politicians remained sitting. Despite the hazard. Statistically half of them would die from a heart infarct. They would not only die, but die in pain. But that was what doctors and other fanatics said. To the statisticians it was just either or, and thus a choice between chance and risk. So they remained sitting.And to them society had long ago ceased to have any meaning. There was neither man nor meaning. Even the celebrated voters which were so much in focus around elections times in earlier days had been forgotten. What remains was only the frequent opinion polls.But that might be a question of time.Statistically it was impossible. There were probably a number of other reasons, but that was the most importent one. The group around him did not touch the ground. Admittedly, by no more than a couple of centimetres, but that was enough to make infeasible.Since the turn of the century, at any rate, all information had been collected about the physical and psychical characteristics of the population and so far nobody had been able to lift off the ground. By means of a simple projection it became clear too that nobody ever would. Now they were doing it. Despite the ceaseless preaching: Modesty, austerity and responsibility.When the time froze solid the final paradox had ceased to exist.The population had not recovered its voice as the panic in the governmental building seemed to indicate.On the contrary. It was a silent as ever. As when the voters spoke in chart bars and diagrams, and the world consisted of voters who could, with one or two words – yes or no – explain the political text of the day. In several ways, at that.But that, after all, was the horizon of the politicians. Empiricism was a triviality and any change was for the worse. Now everything could happen.It was much worse, actually.Ten minutes passed before he came aware of it and then it was too late. Time refound its place in history and he was irretrievably caught in his own lingering. In a shadowy world, ten minutes before everything. With astonishing clearness he realized the seriousness of the situation, for the first time with a smile.We have all welcomed him, of course. Not until after a few minutes we shall know whether he is comfortable. After all, it is a new experience every time.