Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 229
other government spending outside the sacred military toilet. The mob
went mad, especially those who didn't have the foggiest notions of the old
man's philosophy; he has insulted kings, bishops, bankers, all of them, and he
has survived—that is enough to make him a national hero.
The due d'Orleans—"the friend of the people," as he is called—sets about
recruiting the champion of Free Thought into Free Masonry at once.
Voltaire agrees, placidly. M. Franklin is requested to act as Worshipful
Master of the East in the initiation, and is happy to oblige. It is a great
moment when the hoodwink is removed, and the most famous Rationalist
of the age sees that he has been engaged in revolutionary rituals with the
most famous Scientist of the age—the man who hurled lightning bolts at
the Vatican faces the man who tamed the lightning with a key on a kite string.
After the initiation, some say, M. Voltaire and M. Franklin had a banquet
with the Marquis de Condorcet and discussed science and philosophy. The
big gorilla was trying to make it work.
The elusive pony is kiddy porn in the basement.
M. Condorcet, in the course of this symposium, asserted that with the
steady advance of medicine (moving faster everywhere, as the steady
decline of the Inquisition accelerated) a time would come when every disease
would be abolished. M. Franklin agreed, but M. Voltaire said it would take
longer than they realized. M. Condorcet then went further and said that, in
a thousand years, when all governments were staffed by Freemasons and
the last doddering priest had been killed by a brick falling from the last
decaying church, medicine would advance to the point where death itself
would be abolished. M. Franklin agreed again—he had written a bit on that
subject himself, diplomatically leaving out the necessity of abolishing
Christianity before this could be accomplished. M. Voltaire was again
skeptical. Life extension was possible, he agreed, but immortality was a
Christian superstition and unworthy of scientific minds.
M. Condorcet then grew more enthusiastic (they were on their third
bottle of wine by then) and announced that he could foresee major reforms
in the next century alone. M. Franklin listened, spellbound, as M. Condorcet
pictured for them endless caves and labyrinths—a world in which education
was free for all, boys and girls alike, and schools were taught by rational
well-educated men and women, not by narrow-minded priests and nuns. A
world in which insurance companies, some run by private investors and
some by the state, would pay decent premiums to those injured and
disabled, and even to those unemployed by economic recession. A world in
which the state would loan the money for scientific and technological
research not even imaginable today, perhaps even to fly to the moon. A
world in which every city had free public libraries, like the one M. Franklin
had started in Philadelphia, and the state and private investors would offer