Tivolian Cowardice

Sci-fi writers really observe people so closely and can lift out behaviour traits so well and isolate them just to make them sound/look ridiculous until one day you’re like: OMG I know a Tivolian!!

Now, Tivolians are a humanoid race of people from the planet Tivoli whose main defining trait is cowardice. But this cowardice was not subjective or passive. In fact, this cowardice was very calculated. The Eleventh Doctor would describe it as “aggressive cowardice”.

At first glance, the Tivolians were a society of cowards who had grown so used to being conquered and occupied by other races it had become a way of life just to accept it. They never defended themselves and did everything they could to make their conquerors as comfortable as possible. In fact their anthem was basically “Glory to [Insert Name Here]” so as to make it easier for invaders. 

All this seemed amusing, if but slightly exhausting, and you even feel sad for them and maybe would defend them, until you start to realise that this cowardice was decidedly a plan of hostile action. That at the core of it was a combative disloyalty. You realise that a Tivolian would switch sides on you the moment the wind shifted.

Now do you understand my first para better? You do know a Tivolian in real life too, don’t you?

Kill That Hope

Abandon hope, Dante’s Inferno tells the reader, when you enter hell. That this line should be one of the most (if not the most, altogether) recognizable line from medieval literature should tell us something, I believe.

Why are we supposed to abandon hope? Because hope sets us up. Hope pertains to something that hasn’t yet transpired. Hope is deceptive. Hope is inherently biased. Hope can lead us to boundless delusions and we may forever end up entertaining illusions.

It is dangerous to give people hope if you’re only going to take it away. Desperate people are dangerous. And you should not frustrate people in this day and age when we are all just a hair trigger away from turning into werewolves, even without the full moon. People are by and large disappointed with Life. If you’re not going to be able to deliver, don’t promise them things. We’ve all sort of accepted that we are rolling in the mud and we just shuffle along. But when someone gives us hope, we start to dream. Like pigs staring out at the stars from a pigpen, as it often happens. That’s when people abandon hope and become exactly who naysayers have always said they would be, the worst versions of themselves. It is an incredibly rigged system. And sometimes we are the ones who contribute to it. Maddening, no?

Of course, we don’t like to introspect, so we don’t realise it or accept these vexing thoughts of ourselves to ourselves. Even when our actions have fanned out to undeniable negative repercussions, we rationalize it and say we have done what we have for the greater good. The greater good. What a concept! So grandiose. And so deceptive. Anyone who’s ever read Harry Potter would understand how flawed this phrase is. In real life, any student of Political Science would instantly recognize this as a flaw in democracy. Who is the greater? A demographic majority? An elite majority? Who?

I don’t know, man. Maybe the call to abandon hope is apt today because maybe the world has already ended and we are in Inferno, without our realizing it. There are glitches in the Matrix, as us sci-fi nerds like to say. Every few days, there are new evidences of Mandela Effects. I was always so sure it was ‘Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear’, for example; apparently it has always been ‘Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear’; I refuse to believe this.

But I am stupid. And I remain thus. Like my sci-fi hero, The Doctor of Gallifrey, I am, and always will be, the optimist; the hoper of far-flung hopes, and the dreamer of improbable dreams. And when in the course of time, I have to choose between sacrificing/killing people for the greater good or being a coward, I hope I choose to be a coward.

Timetravel and Sci-fi in the Bible

When you think of sci-fi in the Bible, Ezekiel is your go-to guy. He is, after all, the guy who saw a wheel in a wheel and eyes all around. People have forever thought what he saw was an UFO, by which I very much do mean the classic flying saucer.

But this muse is not on UFOs but actually on time-travel.

So consider this. One fine day Moses the great leader climbed up Mount Sinai and met God. His face shone with the light of God. God and he spoke there and he came down with some ground rules for Christians.

Many years later, the prophet Elijah fled to Mount Horeb. There he encountered God again, as a still small voice. A calm. A peace, if you will.

Many more years passed and Jesus brought three friends with him up a mountain called Tabor. There he was Transfigured. He shone. And Peter, James and John saw with him two figures of old – Moses and Elijah.

There is this theory that floats around the internet sometimes and unless you’re a sci-fi fan, your algorithm would not catch it. One of them is that Moses and Elijah did not appear there on Mount Tabor with Jesus as ghosts. Rather, they had travelled through space and time for a dual purpose – one, to be with Jesus at his hour of need, and, two, to converse with God. And they did both.

In the biblical language, we find a one-day-one-thousand-days equivalency for God. In sci-fi lingo, we’d say that God exists outside the space-time continuum. So for Moses and Elijah to meet Jesus even when they are separated by centuries is an easy possibility. Madame Vastra always said time-travel was always possible in dreams, and would hold tea parties in dreams, calling together for meetings people separated by time and space. The Doctor often sends out the TARDIS to collect people separated by time and space to stand with him. For a sci-fi fan, it’s really not that hard to imagine.

I’m not saying this is real. It is a theory that someone proposed. And I really found it fun, amusing and enchanting.

Of course, while Mount Sinai and Mount Horeb are one and the same place, Mount Tabor isn’t. But if you want the facts to fit your theory, you could always say Mount Tabor was the Main Console and Mount Horeb was where you need to stand so the teleporter or transmitter or whatever thingamajic would ‘beam you up’.

Fun, no?