Introduction

The Longest Sunrise By Vittorio Hugo Svoboda

Introduction:

It’s been twenty-five years, a quarter century, since the first country, Costa Rica as it happened, Transitioned. That means that there is now a generation, which in the English-speaking world we refer to as “Generation T,” that has only known life after the transition. Within six years, most of the countries in the world transitioned as everyone saw how overwhelmingly positive life in transitioned countries became and the initial fear of the unknown wore off. The more countries transitioned, the faster the trend spread.

The use of money has now become a distant memory, a quaint and disquieting ghost of a harsher, more brutal past alongside gladiatorial games, Inquisitions, and slavery. It’s as hard for us now to imagine what it was like when one had to constantly come up with money for even the most basic necessities, as it would have been for the people then to imagine societies without money. It’s hard now to remember clearly the initial reaction of fear and distrust that greeted Costa Rica as they transitioned and immediately after. As you read these brave people’s stories, try to imagine yourself as they were then, when they could hardly imagine a society without money and all that went with it; they were moving into what was for them the unknown, based on the vision of a better world and scientific evidence. We must appreciate and respect their courage and determination!

Cultural myths die hard, and the unknown is always scary. But after a week or two of frantic calls to and from foreigners in Costa Rica at the time and Costa Ricans with family overseas, the mood of panic and worry began to give way to surprise and even wonder. After such a sudden, dramatic change, life went on almost like nothing had happened, for the most part. Well, almost. Suddenly people were told that since money was abolished, everything was free while they stayed in the country. Disbelief gave way to giddiness and eventually leveled out as the new normal settled in.

The world has changed so much, so fast, that it would be easy to eventually forget just how monumental a human undertaking it was and how much courage it took for the first pioneers to undo most of what they had ever known to try something completely untried on that big a scale. For this reason, the writers and publishers of the International Historical Syndicate decided to interview people who were alive at the time and still remember it. We picked people from different countries and from different walks of life, both before and after transition, and covering a wide age range, in order to preserve as full a picture as possible of what it was like to be living at that time. This is the time for this project, since we have people still alive who remember before the transition, people who were part of it, and people who grew up in the world after transition. This is a unique moment in history.

Sometimes people wonder why transition isn’t capitalized as in Transition. It was such an important historical event after all. The reasoning behind this consensus goes back to the very beginning. There was a sentiment that capitalizing it could subtly give rise to a mindset of transition as a static event in the past, as a fait accompli. The hope is to set up a mindset of transition as a living, evolving process in which we each play a part, shaping it, improving it as we go.

Formats of the interviews will vary according to the individual interview styles of the interviewers. For the sake of authenticity, we decided that we should let all contributors be themselves to reflect the diversity of human experience.

To briefly recap the course of transitioning in the world for future generations, we’ll include a quick review. Much has been written about this in popular press and scholarly publications, but it’s worth including in this work which focuses on the human experiences of those who lived and worked through it.

In Costa Rica, transition happened pretty smoothly. The seminal work, the now famous book “The Cure: Of, By, And For The People,” both the full-length and the shorter version, was quickly translated into other languages from the original English as it was passed from person to person and downloaded like a snowball growing and gathering momentum. The first translation was into Spanish. It quickly found its way though most of Latin America.

Costa Rica was the first to act because conditions were just right, and enough people were receptive. Being a liberal democracy with a background of successful socialism that had eroded steadily away before the pressures of capitalism, and given the fairly high level of literacy there, it was a natural next step for a people who understood what they had lost and what they needed.

At first there was international outcry as images of violent revolutions in Latin America’s past flitted through people’s minds. But within a fairly short time it became clear even to skeptics that the transition had been an orderly shift that had generated no serious violence or disruptions of any kind.

The first transitions were all in Central and South America, so many analysts considered it to be pretty much an idiosyncratic Latin American thing… until Ghana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe transitioned. Within a year, seventeen counties in Latin America, Africa, and Asia had transitioned.

Reactions were extreme in Russia, China, and the United States as well as the Arabic countries, especially after Israel was the eighteenth country to transition; the people there had grown weary of increasingly corrupt, inhumane politicians blatantly running the country in clear partnership with some of the worlds most toxic, Machiavellian big businesses.

The United States, Russia, and China formed an uneasy alliance and tried to sanction transitioned countries and otherwise put pressure on them to return to the old status quo, but they didn’t have much success because the transitioned countries simply weren’t committing any atrocities and comported themselves as good global citizens. Attempts to destabilize transitioned governments failed because the dynamics had changed; the tactics that had worked in the past just didn’t work anymore. Many multinational corporations around the world were losing serious revenue as their facilities and even headquarters in transitioned countries ceased playing by the long-established rules and were unresponsive to chains of command.

On the other hand, word got around that transitioned countries produced superior products at bargain-basement prices, and multinationals that lost control over transitioned facilities discovered they gained thereby a competitive edge: since overhead was virtually nonexistent in transitioned facilities, they could outclass and underprice competitors who had no transitioned facilities.

The Russian Federation was the twentieth country to transition. The country was depleted culturally, mentally, emotionally, economically and socially from decades of unrestrained corrupt oligarchy and failed wars of expansion that drained the heart and spirit of the Russian people. When the economy effectively crashed, the government fell apart, and a good two thirds of the people were ready to transition. Seizing the moment, they filled voids that had formed in almost every aspect of Russian society. Oligarchs and their retinues fled immediately, only to be deported back to Russia; no country wanted to accept them. But instead of being arrested, tortured, imprisoned and “disappeared” as they fully expected, they were welcomed and promised safe passage. They had lost their power and privilege but went unmolested and frustrated that no one jumped when they snapped their fingers, but otherwise unharmed.

Canada was the twenty-fifth country to transition, with Quebec leading the way.

The United States and India had similar challenges in their transitions, though for very different reasons.

In the United States, runaway, unrestrained income inequality had become so extreme that the country was coming undone. It was referred to internationally as a new category of country: not undeveloped, not developing, not developed, but as a “devolving country.” A period of autocratic and brutal rule had erased all but the veneer of democracy and civilization. There was a widespread feeling that sooner or later, transition would happen there too or at least become a possibility.

The government was hysterically afraid of the transitioning that they saw happening around the world, so they put out a lot of propaganda declaring the phenomena to be “communist,” “socialist,” and “anarchy.” In Texas, Florida, and the Southern states, this propaganda fell on fertile soil; it became a felony to possess or share a copy of “The Cure,” which of course piqued the interest of a lot of people and actually expanded its audience. In New England and the mid-Atlantic Eastern Seaboard, and on the West Coast, it was fertile ground for “The Cure.” The propaganda outlets of the hostile states were jammed and spoofed with great enthusiasm. In the middle of the country, it was a patchwork. Colorado, New Mexico, Illinois, parts of Kansas were ripe for transition. Idaho, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Arizona were hostile. A number of states were about evenly split.

When transition came, it started in the receptive states mentioned above. Texas tried to declare independence, and there was an abortive attempt in the Southern states to revive the Confederacy but both were quickly quelled by the faction of the divided military who were pro transition, having received the go-ahead from the Federal government since even though the President and House were afraid of transition, they were even more afraid of the political and economic fallout from either a successful secession or an all-out civil war. The anti transition faction of the military refused to take part.

International observers all commented on the restraint and humanity used by the military in ending the insurrection. The ringleaders were arrested and tried in open trials watched around the world. International observers reported that there was an unprecedented lack of destruction or reprisals.

But it was an election year. With some states fully transitioned, some states resisting, and some states partially transitioned, this issue eclipsed all other issues on the campaign trails of both parties. One party cited the positive outcomes seen in transitioned counties and the similar outcomes emerging in transitioned states as compared to un-transitioned states and vowed to work with the transition for the benefit of everybody. The other party used AI-generated images and video depicting starving, beaten people against backgrounds of dilapidated ruins of cities. They promised to “save the country from globalist anarcho-communist socialist fascist Illuminati Satanists” at all costs. The pro-transition party came out in control of the presidency and both houses.

Surprisingly, for the first time in recent history, the bitterly opposing parties swiftly passed legislation with strong bipartisan support: taxation was abolished altogether. For the pro-transition party, this was a logical step since money had ceased to have any function in most of the country. For the anti-transition party, abolishing taxes was like the Holy Grail, and they touted it as a victory. Of course, they didn’t have any idea what the transition was or how it worked; they were reacting to their imaginations. neither party could really control, cause, or stop the transition since it came from the grass roots and didn’t directly affect them… but they had to adapt.

With taxation ended, the un-transitioned states soon found themselves unable to function economically or really get anything done. The only exceptions were facilities connected to ones in transitioned states, and direct aid from neighboring transitioned states. Within a fairly short time, the transition was complete.

This precipitated a civil war in Mexico as the drug cartels lost most of their income because the lucrative North American market had dried up overnight, so they tried to take over the government. The country was devastated with no clear victory for either side. In this chaos, transition emerged and quickly got things up and running again, working closely with government to restore a much-improved normal life. Interestingly enough, the elimination of all forms of currency caused the cartels to decline quickly like a fire going out when deprived of oxygen. The existential support for their operations was gone. A similar scenario played out in Colombia a short time later.

No one will ever forget the comic relief when North Korea’s Supreme Leader decided that the United States would be vulnerable and launched three nuclear ICBM’s targeting Washington DC, New York, and San Francisco. The United Stares was on high alert and more than capable of destroying the missiles mid-flight, but the “Gotchya” hacker group were eager to meet the challenge. They succeeded in hacking into the missiles’ guidance systems and made them detonate in space directly above Pyongyang, whose residents were treated to a few seconds of noonday sunlight well after dark. This was followed by the signature “Gotchya!” Emblazoned on the image of a banana cream pie-in-the-camera’s-face and spoken in a deep booming synthetic voice that cut into the state media broadcast.

India’s transition superficially resembled that of the United States, but the support and opposition broke down more ethnically than geographically. Most Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, lower castes, and believers in Kali and Shiva embraced the idea of transition; higher castes, devotees of Brahma and Vishnu, mostly feared that transition would take away their privileged status. There were those who were ambivalent as well.

The Indian government walked a delicate balance, not wishing to have civil war happen on their watch. As happened in the United States, though, the improvements in daily life brought by transition spoke for themselves. Which shop would you go to: the one charging money or the one where everything was free even if there were reasonable limits on quantity? Which telecom company would you go with: the one that charges you for equipment and service or the one that’s free? In what amounted to yet another arena of direct competition between the old way of life and the new, the better way prevailed.

Eventually the only countries who hadn’t transitioned were either ones where the quality of life been mostly good before the wave of transition washed across the globe, such as Finland, Norway, and Iceland, or ones under such tightly controlled dictatorships that the necessary prerequisite overthrow of the government was not yet on the horizon. The former eventually transitioned because it seemed like a logical thing to do, with these countries’ government actively participating in the transitions. The latter are now only a handful. Analysts predict that within a decade, their regimes will collapse, and transition will be possible.

It’s been said that if we forget and fail to understand history, we are doomed to repeat it. This is a truly awe-inspiring time to be alive almost everywhere in the world. For the first time in recorded history, war has become the exception rather than the rule, hunger and poverty have been virtually eliminated, and the level of social and international harmony as well as the degree happiness and empowerment of individuals is unprecedentedly high.

It would be easy to be starry-eyed optimistic and believe that we’ve “arrived” and that we’ll never have to relive the nightmares of what is now called pre-modern feudalism; but history has taught us that the “it can’t happen here” mindset is dangerous and foolhardy. One only has to look at how after only 250 years or so, the United States devolved into brutal autocracy and Europe, less than a hundred years after the horrors of the Second World War and Nazism, came perilously close to doing the same. We must remember where we’ve been so we can wisely choose where we’re going. Five hundred years from now, the period of transition will be a chapter in history books, not a living memory. We hope that this work and these memories of people who were there and lived through it will keep awareness and appreciation of what we’ve achieved, and steer clear of choices that could undo it.

We still face problems and challenges. While a beneficial side effect of widespread transitioning has been the near elimination of human practices that drove the climate crisis, it will take more time to re-establish optimal, stable global climate and restore as much as possible of the ecosystem that was devastated. We still have areas of ethnic, religious, and cultural strife and prejudice that, while less virulent than before transition, still persist. Past wrongs are hard to let go, and present retaliation for past wrongs keeps resentment alive. We still have disease, physical and mental illness, and crime (especially crimes of passion), though in significantly lower levels than before transition. We still have a few “alpha” personalities that appear along with other personality types susceptible to their influence under the wrong circumstances. We face the need to manage our natural resources wisely while still advancing technologically. Last year’s near miss by Asteroid Henry reminds us of the fragility of life. We never saw it coming until it would have been too late. Next time we’ll be better prepared. The bonemelt virus pandemic reminds us we need to be better prepared for future pandemics, though we met this challenge more successfully than any previous pandemic in history.

In short, humanity is better off than we’ve ever been, but we still face problems and challenges. But there is no doubt that we have what it takes to meet them successfully.

So, without further ado, let’s get to the recollections!

- Beatrice Allen, Editor of the Day, with concurrence of the other Syndics except Jamal Morris, Ulumummu Wakasi, and Efrat Dor who all felt that this intro was too long

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