An allegory for infernalism

Imagine you’re born into severe debt, because your great-great-great-grandfather attempted to rip off someone really powerful.

While still a baby, you’re placed in a debtors’ prison, alongside all of the other descendants of criminal grandpa. You grow up in it. You can earn some money in said prison, but no matter how hard or smart you work, you’ll never be able to pay off your share of the debt. Even if you’re the smartest and hardest working guy that ever lived, you still can’t pay off the debt faster than the interest accrues. It’s simply mathematically impossible.

When you get too old, sick, or injured to work any longer, you’re taken out of the prison and thrown into a torture chamber—which makes sense, because there needs to be justice for that unpaid debt, right?

But wait! There’s good news: There’s a really nice guy out there named Mr. Liberator that will pay off prisoners’ debts for them so they can be free! All you have to do is write a letter to Mr. Liberator politely asking for assistance, and he will pay off your share of the debt. Isn’t that amazing and kind? Well, just one problem: this offer isn’t public or widespread knowledge.

Sure, there’s a few messengers employed by Mr. Liberator that swing by during visiting hours to tell people about his amazing offer, but there’s thousands of scammers that also visit at the same time, promising approximately the same thing, yet end up just screwing some prisoners into further debt. And also, a lot of Mr. Liberator’s messengers show themselves to be cruel, stupid, and hypocrites during visiting hours, so there’s good reason to think they too are scammers. Meaning the only way you’re going to believe the truthful messengers is if you’re unbelievably lucky and manage to trust the right guys by pure chance.

There’s another way you can take up Mr. Liberator’s offer, though. He will occasionally write a letter to an individual debtor, informing them of this excellent deal, and wires the money to their account before they even have a chance to say ‘No’!

… Just not all of them, unfortunately. Mr. Liberator appears to pick prisoners he’s going to wire the money to by some arbitrary means. And it’s a rather small percentage of the prisoners, too; in all likelihood, you’re not going to get the free money at all. True, he’s so wealthy that he could even abolish every prisoners’ debt and still remain unfathomably rich, but he doesn’t; it’s his money and he gets to decide what to do with it, after all.

And also, those blessed chosen debtors still have to stay in the prison until they’re old/injured, too; it is only at that point when they get to leave the prison, instead of going to the torture chamber. Moreover, nobody in the prison gets to see which one they go to. So the remaining prisoners don’t have any reason to think the chosen debtors ended up differently than the others.

Well, anyway, Mr. Liberator’s a really great guy for paying off the debts for a handful of prisoners, isn’t he!

So great, in fact, you didn’t even notice he’s the one who owns the debtors’ prison and torture chamber, and is in fact the person to whom everyone owes the debt. But don’t criticize the system! Mr. Liberator is less likely to forgive your debt if you don’t feel the whole ordeal is fair. You’re supposed to be really, really thankful that you’re lucky enough to be among the chosen to be freed.

And if any other prisoners think the system’s not fair? Well, their share of the debt accumulated more interest while they lived within the prison, so it’s really their own fault if they end up in the torture chamber, if you think about it. Mr. Liberator’s really kind, but he’s also just, which means he has to do something about all those people who owe him money but weren’t lucky enough to get their share of the debt forgiven, either because he didn’t pick them to directly send a letter to, and/or because they didn’t trust the messengers (who are frequently malevolent liars) he sent.

So, fuck ’em.

They had a choice, didn’t they?