Leslie the Elder Addresses the Hive Mind

Greetings drone and greetings to your great collective, particularly to your Queen, may her egg pouch never run empty. So you have come at last to speak with Les the Elder, but what can this ancient tell that a million minds in concert do not already know? Ah, well that is indeed an old story. To tell it I must once again turn my mind to the time of my youth, the chaos age, known to some as the days of horse hockey but to all as a time of great confusion…

You asked to hear tell of how man ruled himself in the chaos age. It is not a simple thing to tell. For you see in those dark times we had no brain crest or pheromone trail to guide us in the selection of leaders. Instead we were forced to listen to those few foolish enough to want the job explain to us why they should have it. Whichever candidate convinced the most voters was then given the job. This system, called democracy, might have worked had it not been for the pandemic idiocy of the time. You see, most voters were fools, and this insensate collective mostly feared the truth or worse, believed it to be a lie. This meant that only charming morons or pandering cynics could win sufficient support. Even in that age of fools some of us knew that the likelihood of a great leader and a charming panderer inhabiting the same body was near nil, but we continued to cast our vote for myopic fools and calculating hypocrites. We had to; for fear that the candidate who pandered to the other idiots might gain the seat.

Because democracy inevitably picked the wrong people to lead we were constantly forced to select new leaders. This we did every few years; for that was generally how long it took for the incompetence and corruption of a leader to become apparent. The constant renewal of leadership was the one thing that kept our limping ship of state from the shoals of reality. The new leadership would usually address the most glaring failures of the old leadership, while generating a whole slew of new problems for the next administration to struggle against.

Of course you know how it ended, in the blasted hellscape that was once the mars colony, so I’ll end my story here. I must say it has been a rare pleasure to speak to you; I have few reasons to talk these days. This old tree is a good listener, but it has long since heard all that I have to say.