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Mattystereo — The Last Election (2150)

#africa #ethiopia #future #scifi
Published: 2018-08-19 22:06:04 +0000 UTC; Views: 7980; Favourites: 77; Downloads: 17
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Ethiopia has always been a land of exceptions and oddities. Stretching back to antiquity it saw the rise and fall of the world’s great civilizations, housed the communities of all the Abrahamic faiths, halted the advance of the early ummah, stood firm against European imperialism, and saw both the dissolving of an authoritarian state into a democracy and the first democratic election of a Dynamist government in history. For the last of these peculiarities we must first understand what preceded it. In the early 21st century, starting with the reformation of the majoritarian EPRDF government Ethiopia began the process of creating a fifth constitution for the purposes of transitioning from an effectively one-party state to a multiparty democracy. The Fifth constitution instituted wide sweeping changes such as the merging of the President and Prime Minister, the absorption of local militias into the national guard, the protection of private property and the partial privatization of some state industries, and most importantly of all: The abolition of the ethnic states and the ethnic constitutions.

By the point in time Ethiopia was divided into a number of ethnic substates, each with their own constitution alongside the federal constitution, each with their own local parties and councils, and each with laws that limited the rights of non-regional ethnicities within their realms (most notably the right to own property in a region not of one’s birth). This ethnic federalism emerged in response to the policies of the Dergist era, but in most cases merely empowered local existing cliques and wabenzi that emerged during Ethiopia’s economic takeoff. Under the fifth constitution not only were the substates dissolved but the regions of Ethiopia were redrawn, and rechristened “electoral states”, in such a way to prevent any dominant ethnicity in any state where possible.

Although met initially with skepticism and some violent dissent, the new government’s support from the United States, UAE, India, China, and France, both in foreign direct investment and military modernization, quickly quelled any nascent ethnic revolt. The new government’s prestige was then secured in the aftermath of the Sino-American War, which the Ethiopian government successfully brokered the ceasefire to. The sight of American and Chinese diplomats and military officials shaking hands in Addis Ababa cemented the idea of Ethiopia as a world power, and to the public the idea that the new government had brought them there.

As the democratic system solidified Ethiopia became dominated by a coalition of center-right parties, typified by the Ethiopian Democratic Party and its sister party the National Revival Union. Albeit from the 2052 to 2067 and again from 2072 to 2077 Ethiopia was under the influence of a Leftist-Green-Developmentalist Coalition in what was known as the “Green Generation”. As a result of the climate crisis Ethiopia found itself subject to roughly 6 million refugees from the South Asia, Latin America, and the USA during the 21st century. In the case of the last group, the American diasporids would play a part in the introduction of Shawism into Ethiopian society and with it the founding of the Popular Front as an important opposition coalition in the government. At the tail end of the Green Generation Ethiopia came the closest it ever had to a Shawista Government, but an impromptu Green-Developmentalist-Democratic filibustering coalition and an emergency election curtailed Shawism’s rise.

As with most states in Africa, Dynamism came to hold an inordinate amount of sway in Ethiopian society, and the desire for a stronger government, even stronger still than that of the fourth constitution reemerged. The Dynamist movement in Ethiopia would see initial success in pulling away conservative and green voters from their parties’ ranks, a process that would accelerate with the onset of violence between cryptofascists and leftists in the major metroregions of the country. While the capitalization on right-left violence was popular of Dynamist movements, especially those that emerged in Europe, in Ethiopia the Dynamist Party took a particular interest the descendants of climate refugees, most of whom were either politically inactive, unregistered, or leaned towards leftist organizations such as the Shawists. By breaking the back of the conservative parties and relegating what remained of them to an awkward coalition of centrists and Somalian nationalists, capitalizing on and absorbing the green movement, and undercutting the left’s base, the Dynamists came to amass the largest unofficial coalition in Ethiopian history.

The Dynamist coalition by the turn of the 22nd century was dominated by two tendencies, the Internationalists and the Africanists. The internationalists were those closer to the dictates of the Dynamists in China and based their vision of a future Dynamist society on that of an augmented Confucian bureaucracy. The Africanists, pioneers of “Dynamism with African Characteristics” instead advocated for a wholly Ethiopian brand of Dynamism known as “The Audience” that would instead opt for local democratic election of Dynamist candidates who would then be sent to schooling to become civil servants. The Africanists also held more fringe views such as the universal use of sympathetic drugs and surgery on the population, as opposed to China’s more conservative use of sympathetic engineering only on those who applied to join the civil service.

Alongside these two “orthodox” dynamist wings were the National Commodification Party, which was a rebranded Developmentalist Party that saw dynamism as a means to commodify cultural products and make Ethiopia a cultural superpower. Then there was the Social Capital Party, which leaned more towards traditional democratic parties, but had sided with the Dynamists in response to the increasing ethnicisim and anti-globalism of the Democrats.

As the 2102 elections dawned, the first elections of the 22nd century saw the Dynamist coalition winning a clear and overwhelming majority over both the Democrats and the Popular Front. In response, and motivated by the Tiqurabbay Anti-State, the Popular Front revolted, and shortly thereafter the Somalian National Party did as well. Presenting the crisis as engineered by both foreign nationalists and international leftists the Dynamist Party barred the SNP and the Popular Front from the legislature. Seeing that they were the only opposition left, the Democrats acquiesced to the Dynamists and joined the Social Capital and Commodification Parties en masse. The Dynamists now were the legislature.

Ultimately the great revolt would come to an end, and in its wake a newly unified Dynamist Ethiopia rose. The legislature was soon abolished in favor of a bureaucratic body, and the office of the Presidency (which stood unoccupied during the revolt) was replaced by a central committee. In the struggle between the Internationalists and the Africanists, the Africanists won, due in no small part to purges of the party conducted during the great revolt. The Audience would be implemented, and soon the central committee too would be abolished in favor of a truly bottom-up form of Dynamism enforced by a universally augmented population. As of 2150 two generations have come and gone knowing nothing but the audience and a Dynamist Ethiopia, and for the large part no desire for a return to democracy can be seen.

As for the other side of the great revolt, what remained of the Popular Front eventually moved to the Blue Nile beyond Ethiopia and had a hand in the Green Revolution of 2139 there, others have found their way to Communist Greece and Central Asia, where they still reside today. For the Somalian Nationalists they were exiled from the country, but soon found no warmth from the Somalian States, who had sought an alliance with the new Ethiopian Dynamists. Many can be found in the outer colonies, and aside from the Roma, Ethio-Somalians are one of the most popular faces one sees of cargo craft pilots and colonial engineers.

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Comments: 10

Geedubs [2021-07-05 14:15:05 +0000 UTC]

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

JonasGraf [2018-08-26 11:22:11 +0000 UTC]

Beauty style and some interesting parties Good job

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Whachamacallit1 [2018-08-20 15:29:23 +0000 UTC]

I admit, some of the aspects that change--like the sympathetic drugs stuff--make me think of Brave New World stuff, and quite obviously unsettled. But I guess it's an example of how people's viewpoints change over time.

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Mattystereo In reply to Whachamacallit1 [2018-08-21 00:29:48 +0000 UTC]

Ethiopia is an exception in terms of mass application under the dynamists. In most cultures, even non-dynamist ones, sympathetic engineering is something people choose to do, though as a result people who willingly undergo such things tend to be held in a higher regard, not just because they elected to voluntary brain surgery for other people but also because sympathetic engineering simply makes the recipient a more thoughtful and trustworthy person.

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AlexanderBranza [2018-08-19 23:33:32 +0000 UTC]

An interesting, if somewhat depressing, scenary.

But what are sympathetic drugs and surgery?

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Mattystereo In reply to AlexanderBranza [2018-08-19 23:51:38 +0000 UTC]

Sympathetic drugs and surgery basically heighten and speed up the response times of mirror neurons and raise the number of connections and anticipatory response time between areas in the brain responsible for empathic feelings and abstraction. Essentially it makes people kinder, more compassionate, and more able to intuit how others feel and how they'd respond to actions.

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OneHellofaBird In reply to Mattystereo [2018-08-20 22:14:50 +0000 UTC]

sounds like Stanislaw Lem's "betrization" (I mean other writers have examined the question, but Return from the Stars is my favorite exploration of it)

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Mattystereo In reply to OneHellofaBird [2018-08-21 00:27:05 +0000 UTC]

Sympathetic engineering doesn't make people unable to be aggressive, or self-interested, or impulsive, nor does it make them risk-averse. In that sense humans undergoing sympathetic engineering would be less "inhuman" from our perception and more like a person who is more thoughtful and considerate than the baseline and more able to "get" what you mean when you express your emotions. This is very useful for dynamist bureaucracies as a means of mitigating corruption, because an individual is less likely to say, embezzle money if they are more intuitively drawn to think about and feel for those people they would effectively be stealing from. At the same time it also prevents nepotism and cliques as people are more willing to genuinely consider the public interest when making actions for who to promote instead of who is the nicest to them. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but way less than nowadays. Now there are some more extreme versions of temporary sympathetic and more specifically anti-ego engineering, such as "flow", but that will have its own update.

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spleak334 In reply to Mattystereo [2018-08-20 02:36:28 +0000 UTC]

not as evil as I thought. and great on the roma, how are they in the future and do they have the own state and will there be a update on a far right  group like the kkk, alt right or the future far right terrorist groups in america? how Ecuador? also for the IB was there any connections to the first IB from the Spanish civil war?

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Mattystereo In reply to spleak334 [2018-08-21 00:31:53 +0000 UTC]

The Roma will not have their own state on Earth, and they have yet to have a "nation" in the colonies. Groups such as the KKK and such, and their 2150 descendants, have been something I have written and aborted multiple times. Suffice to say i'll get to them when I feel the narrative needs them. As for the IB, yes there was amongst some members an ideological callback to the original IB, but at the end of the day their contexts are completely different.

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