On planet Heart there lives a race of munahs. One fact about munahs you need to understand is that they don't know how to make anything. But they are able to find things and are quite good at this. A group of five munahs - Annabel, David, Tracy, Zeke and Rohit - were lost at sea in the year of that planet 1612. Luckily for them they fetched up, sooner rather than later, on a small island and set about finding things. Most munahs of that era observed a rule which they expressed as follows: 'finders keepers'. Munahs, you should also know, have five basic needs, and they classify all objects - findables as they are also called - according to those five needs. There is food, there is shelter, there is clothing, there is medicine and there are cultural resources (also sometimes called diversions, and also sometimes called meaningfuls).
Annabel, David, Tracy, Zeke and Rohit duly set about finding some findables to meet their needs. Annabel got herself a spacious and elegant shelter formed by a density of trees, creepers, and other vegetation of strange and wondrous names unknown to this writer. Zeke had a very smart hat within the hour. Rohit happened upon a spherical object near a river, a meaningful if ever there was. Rohit was soon throwing it up and catching it in a leafy glove. All of them found food of various shapes, tastes and textures that would suffice for the settling-in period.
The critical question was, would they find the medicine they all needed? The medicine they all needed was cenipill. Munahs, you see, are vulnerable to an illness they call bleyuughh. It's not fatal, but if you get it, it lays you low for a month (which is 37 days of the Heart calendar); it virtually incapacitates you and makes you feel a bit like the way the name of the illness sounds. Even reading is a profound discomfort, and throwing a spherical object around, that's agony. However, bleyuughh is instantly cured by just a taste of the powder cenipill - and by nothing else known to munahs, at least up to 1612.
Not long after landing on the island, the five munahs did find a quantity of cenipill. Or, rather, Tracy did. But Tracy decided to keep it all for herself, because cenipill is one of the few findables known to munahkind that has a double classification. Not only is it medicine when taken against the onset of bleyuughh; it is also a cultural resource, a diversion, a meaningful. If mixed with the substance brrehd (a munah food) and then ingested while reading, it lends the reading experience an extra zing virtually impossible to translate into human terms but most enriching. Tracy's mononoply of the only cenipill found on the island so far was to become a problem.
A word now about the political arrangements of this mini-community of munahs, and everything will be in place to enable me to describe a transformation that occurred in its affairs eight months after what came to be known as the Date of Settlement. Annabel, David, Tracy, Zeke and Rohit met weekly to agree on, amend or dispense with, the various rules by which they were constrained in their reciprocal dealings. By and large, the five of them respected these rules, once made, but in order to ensure that there was no backsliding, succumbing to temptation or cheating, they appointed two of their number, on a regularly rotating basis, to wield legitimate force against delinquents, as and when such force was required. (The mechanics of this use of force don't need to be described; they relate to specificities of the munah anatomy it would take too long to explain here.)
In any case, eight months after the Date of Settlement and after Annabel, David, Zeke and Rohit had each suffered from three bouts of bleyuughh, the weekly meeting of the island Chregm (council, in our language) amended the old rule 'finders keepers' to read: 'finders keepers - except that all finds of cenipill to be rewarded, for the finder, by a Sweelydeb Bonanza, and the cenipill to be shared equally amongst munahs'. (It was known to be the case, I should perhaps add, that munahs were struck equally often by the dreaded bleyuughh.) The vote in the Chregm was three to two in favour of the modification. Tracy - strangely, you might think - voted for it, along with Annabel and Rohit, having been persuaded by the two of them against her own self-interest and for reasons of fairness. David and Zeke voted against it, on traditionalist grounds.
Historians of this small island community have since debated whether the new rule, making the islanders more equal in the specific respect of now being entitled to the same cenipill holdings, nonetheless rendered them all less free. Some said it did, because the change in the rule constrained them: shares in cenipill were henceforth authoritatively assigned so that you were allowed to use only your equal share of cenipill and not the cenipill belonging to someone else. But others pointed out that the munahs weren't now less free; they were only differently free. For the old rule had also authoritatively assigned cenipill holdings. With as without cenipill-equality, there were rules covering the ownership of cenipill, its legitimate distribution; and these rules would be enforced if they had to be. There was one set of constraints and corresponding liberties of action, liberties of resource-use, or another set - that was the true picture; rather than its being the case that the laws of the island restricted people after the rule-change but not before it.
Most munahs, were they ever to come across a blogpost from planet Earth, put up yesterday by Julian Glover, would therefore disagree with his view that 'Equality is not fundamental to liberty. It is its intractable opposite.'
