On Perfection

The first of many blog posts to make up for my lack of content on OSAF.

"Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence." ~Vince Lombardi

The pursuit of perfection or, at the very least, the pursuit of improvement is what drives human advancement (along with biological stuff like natural selection @Terrence). OSAF, however, explores the darker side of the pursuit of perfection. What happens when we get too close to perfection?

The Charter villages describe such an environment, simultaneously both a utopia in its near-perfection and a dystopia in the fierce academic/extracurricular competition among youth and cutthroat system that forces adults to acquire wealth to avoid demotion to the counties, like Quig. It's true that striving for perfection is important, if not imperative toward human development, but get too close to perfection, and suddenly societal advancement stagnates and utopia flips to dystopia.

Interestingly enough, the facilities also suffer from stagnation. As the Charter villages obsessively move toward perfection, the gap in ability between them and the facilities increases, especially given that the top talent from the facilities migrates to the Charter villages. Once the facilities lose their pipeline to the Charter villages, what happens? The same thing: remove the end goal, and chaos ensues.

Finally, I find it fitting that perfection is unachievable in OSAF. Even as the Charters fine tune their calculations, adding more and more decimal points of precision, they still cannot avoid C-disease, and by extension, the ultimate fate of death. Because if humans could solve everything, what would separate them from gods? And I don't quite think humans are too good at handling power.