Noah Cicero - Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products.

Dr. Charles Nevitsky began to talk, “ Reality Conversion was written in the late fifties by request of Eisenhower. Eisenhower requested a secret commission, an elite group of psychologists, scientists, political scientists, philosophers, geologists, geographers, theologians, historians and even a few novelists and marketing men. Our meetings took place in CIA headquarters. We all got a letter from the CIA stating that if we participated, we would receive a yearly sum of money and a wonderful pension, so we went. It was a wonderful event to me. The room was full of the best people America had to offer. It felt like I was in ancient Athens or Florence during the Renaissance. It made me so happy to be in that room with those extraordinary people.

“We all sat at a roundtable in a very efficient room. Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, came in the room. I was very impressed by him and felt nervous to be in his presence. I was thirty years old then and was still starting my career, and still nervous about such things. Allen Dulles told us that we needed to defeat the Soviets, but there was a problem of belief that was coming. He stated that God had died and there was nothing that could produce a feeling of security and motivation in the lives of men. He stated that he had traveled the world and knew history, that the comfort of religion was vital to man’s happiness and his will to do his duty to his country. He said that America needed a religion that would make the people do their duty and be strong, confident Americans, which meant going to work, rearing their children and not becoming communists. The most important thing was not becoming communists.

“We all agreed that this was vital to America. He gave us a year to do research on the project. He said the government would give us all the money we wanted for our research. The government was handing us a blank check. On top of everything else, we received free housing.

“After a year, we presented our research to Allen Dulles. We knew the most enduring religion was Islam, and what was Islam founded on? Five simple pillars. It’s basically belief in one God, prayer, tithing, visiting Mecca, and fasting. These things are simple. No need to even think about them. So we tried to emulate that, and this is what we came up with. One: Go to work and do your job. Two: Care for your children. Three: Pay your bills. Four: Obey the law. Five: Buy products. These were simple rules to follow and we could notify all citizens of these rules through television, movies, literature and commercials. Allen Dulles loved it. Eisenhower loved it. Of course, there were objections. I told them that this was materialism. This was what the Soviets were doing. They make people into things. They didn’t let people live and become what they wanted. A geologist argued that we needed to incorporate environmental values into the new religion. A philosopher stated that this method was too rigid and that we would become a decadent civilization. The novelist, to our surprise, said that America has had extraordinary people since its founding, that the country only invites the extraordinary, and this method of living would turn people into television-watching consumer automatons, that our children would become weak in mind. He said that we might become complacent, that established paradigms and procedures ranging from government to novels to how we run businesses would not be changed, there would be no innovation, bureaucracy would contaminate everything, that people should run the procedures and not the other way around. That innovation would be destroyed.

“Dulles looked at us and said that we were fighting the communists, that the communists had no problem killing twenty million of their own people, that if communists took control of America then twenty million people would die and live in gulags, and that we could sacrifice a little innovation for the sake of twenty million people not dying, and all of us in this room not being locked away in a gulag. He said this program would end after we beat the Soviets, that after we beat the Soviets we could return to a purer version of America. We did not ask what that was. We didn’t even know what that meant.

“What was strange was that it came true, every one of our predictions except one. The geographer stated something strange but true. He said that nations are cultures that share the same language, but they are more culture than language and culture is derived from landscape. He said that the essence of culture was determined by the buildings people lived in, what they ate, how they worshipped, what music they listened to and what they talked about and that all things were derived from the landscape, that culture arose organically from the elements provided by the landscape that the humans were engulfed in. He brought out a map and said that every nation has become a nation because nature has blocked them in from the other groups. He cited islands, then nations blocked in by mountains, then he cited deep jungles and deserts. He then showed us how the weather in the south changed dramatically from the north, and then he showed us the mountains and deserts that separate parts of America from one another. He stated that America would have an unnatural culture if we forced everyone to believe in the same things, eat the same things, talk about the same things, listen to the same music and do the same things. That trying to keep people together through television and national media wasn’t sustainable. He said that it would be very hard for America to sustain itself because geographically it shouldn’t be one nation, that eventually when communication and when quick and easy travel broke down, there would be a division in culture. But he said that could take a hundred years and was not important when it came to defeating the Soviets.

“We defeated the Soviets. I don’t know why anyone is still using that old paradigm. I figured they would have come up with a new one by now,” Nevitsky concluded.

“But we aren’t,” Monica said, “it’s still the same shit. The Soviets are gone but we’re still fighting them.”

“Oh, we aren’t fighting the Soviets anymore. I could see when Reagan lowered taxes and deregulated the banks, the wealthy had the intelligence, as in CIA intelligence, to know the Soviets had lost and would disappear soon. There were no communists to fight anymore. Why not deregulate everything and destroy the unions? Capitalism and democracy had won, so we went crazy and did anything we wanted. But obviously that didn’t work.”

“But why are they still trying to control people with the old system?” said Monica.

“I suppose because there has been no reason to change it.”

“A reason?”

“There are very few reasons given in life.”

“Oh my god, you are nuts. Everyone is fucking nuts.”

“No, listen. It might seem terrible and absurd, but if you look back, you’ll see we had no choice. We needed to beat the Soviets. That was reason enough.”

“But in the end you became the Soviets. We have a huge bureaucratic government and huge bureaucratic corporations. Even me, little me, all I wanted to do was work on computers and I ended up a bureaucrat.”

Monica felt a terrible pain in her body. She wanted to shoot Nevitsky for creating The Five Pillars, she wanted to destroy everything, she wanted all the pain and fear to end, she wanted everything to be simple. She wanted her old life to come back. She wanted to sit with Mike at a coffee shop discussing the news and what movie they should watch on Netflix. She wanted everything to be normal. But she knew it was over. The normal would never return. She had seen things, she had thought thoughts, she had felt things that would never allow her to feel normal again.

Monica said, “So where is my boyfriend? You must know. You must have some connection at least.”