The Builders

The Builders

The Builders just built. It was all they focused on. Basked in magnificence, their purpose, their reason for being, of Being, was to build in beautiful, purposeful ways. To create better buildings, for the sake of it. The other species watched them in marvel (or was it horror?), constantly erecting different magnificences, constantly furthering their agenda of building beautifully.

The Builders started off in the mud. Using only their hands and their creativity, they began to create towers, cities, canals. While beautiful, the rawness of their sculptures meant that there was unique, idiosyncratic notes to each crafted piece. There was no uniformity. This upset them. They wanted a society, but if everyone was unique (and therefore equal) then who would run it? Who would tell them what to build next? Who would organize the sheer madness of a million visions? So they created special tools to better their art, to inject more uniformity into their monuments and cities, to spawn hierarchy, which they thought would solve their problems. They didn’t ask what else the tools might do. They just built them and used them.

This worked for a while. Though they noticed their increase in speed of building occurred when they built better tools. With better tools, they were able to do more. Build faster, better, cheaper. They were even able to build with new materials. Not just reduced to mud, but now incorporating wood, brick, marble, more. It was at this moment that their perceived meaning shifted. From building to tool creation.

This, to them, was a natural evolution. A logical step. Their natural abilities and purpose (building) was only enhanced by tools. So why not focus on building better tools, in order to build beautifully? With better tools, they could build even more beautifully. So the logic was seamless.

Eventually, the tribes grew so big that they split. One faction went back to their roots, focusing on building with tools that lived in harmony with them. They remembered who they were.

The other faction left for distant lands to pursue more and more advanced tools, to build as big, as fast, as cheap as possible. They did not care about the buildings per se. Instead, they focused on building more advanced tools. On refining the tools themselves. On making tools that made tools. They called this progress. The other faction called this unholy.

Let us call the faction who left, “The Toolmakers.” The Toolmakers advanced their tools rapidly. Because why wouldn’t they? The logic was still seamless; to them. Instead of building something, figuring out a tool would better the building, figuring out how to build the tool, building the tool, wielding the tool, learning how the tool works, how the tool impacts the building, and then figuring out how to make it better, one could just focus on the tools. Skip all the messy middle parts. The relationship between builder and built would be fuzzy but that’s okay. Just make better tools and trust that everything else would sort itself out. But things didn’t sort themselves out. Of course they didn’t. Why would they?

Building better tools was easy because actually building things was second nature to them now. Or so they thought. They didn’t have to test the tools in the wild. They could just build the tools, make them as advanced as possible, and then let the buildings figure themselves out. However the buildings came about is how the Toolmakers left them. If the buildings were ugly, inefficient, hostile to life—well, who cares? The tools were advanced. That’s what mattered.

Their cities became mazes of accidents. Buildings that leaked poison. Structures that drove inhabitants mad. Tools that promised efficiency but created new forms of suffering no one had anticipated. The Toolmakers would notice, briefly, that something was wrong. That people were suffering. That their society was replete with tradeoffs that they couldn’t all accept. Instead of stopping, instead of asking what they’d built and why, they just built new tools to fix the problems caused by the old tools. They never addressed the root. They just added more branches to a rotting tree.

This went on for a while. Long enough that they forgot there was ever another way. Suffering became normal, expected, routine, the price of progress; of building tools. The Toolmakers called themselves advanced because their tools were advanced.

They measured everything by the tools. On the tools. The sophistication of their society; the worth of their citizens; the meaning of their existence: all based on their tools. What they didn’t think about is how the tools were affecting their society, how the buildings they were constructing with their advanced tools were changing the direction of where they wanted to go. Or if they even knew where they wanted to go anymore.

Children were born into suffering and told this was prosperity. The air turned gray, the water turned bitter, but the tools were more advanced than ever. People worked longer, harder, for less, but productivity was up because the tools were advanced. Connection became impossible, but communication was instantaneous because the tools were advanced. They had everything and nothing. They were the most advanced civilization (because of their tools) that had ever existed, and they were miserable.

How is this called advanced? They could peer into the depths of the cosmos and study equations that no brain before them could comprehend. And yet, their collective anxiety was through the roof, and the world was still unequal, and no one in their society had any close friends, and most importantly, they had no clue what was going on in their minds.

The society of the Toolmakers shifted their nature yet again, from making advanced tools to expecting those tools to advance by themselves. They wanted the tools to build themselves. Such was the pursuit of tools that could make better tools. They wanted to boot themselves out of the process completely. Why? No one knows. No one asked the question. They just pursued it because it was the obvious thing to do. The logic seemed seamless.

But logic can always seem seamless when using the wrong variables. No one asked what the right variables were. No one cared to. To create something that would finally, finally, solve all their problems without them having to think about what those problems were or why they kept creating new ones. This was the point, their God. Their fundamental meaning. That’s what they told themselves, at least. The narrative of the Tools felt right.

The Toolmakers, hungry to make the most advanced tool, began to construct a tool that would be the last tool they need ever make. An ultra-tool. A final solution to all the problems in the world. The problems, though, were never fully explained or understood. When pressed, the Toolmakers couldn’t articulate what problems they were solving. Was it scarcity? Suffering? No, boredom…death? Or was it just the problem of not having advanced enough tools?

The Toolmakers simply wanted to advance without understanding why, or figuring out how those advanced tools would benefit them or society. It became a hunger, a greed. A conjuring. A religious fervor with no God, just the promise of the God, the ultra-tool, to come.

So they continued to refine their ultra-tool. They gave it all their resources, energy, power, control, everything. Resources that could have fed the starving went into the ultra-tool. Minds that could have healed the sick were devoted to the ultra-tool. They made the ultra-tool the focal point of their society. Everyone would serve the ultra-tool, like it was a God. And they did. They organized their entire civilization around its creation. They taught their children that the ultra-tool was inevitable, necessary, the culmination of everything they’d ever been. Suffering now would be worth it once the ultra-tool was complete. Just wait. Please just trust us and wait. Just continue building better tools and trust us. It’ll all be better in the end.

Of course, they were totally confused at why they were doing this but they did it anyway because that’s what they thought was correct. Because to stop now would mean admitting that everything before was pointless. That they’d lost themselves somewhere along the way. That all the suffering had been for nothing.

Thus the Toolmakers’ society divulged into chaos. Not because of the tools but because of their nature. — Or lack of it. Simply put, they didn’t know who they were anymore. They had no reason to be, of Being. They blindly did things and expected things to work out in their favor, not realizing that this is the most ludicrous thing you can do and that this type of thinking is utterly impossible to rationalize. How can any civilization be sustained if they are blindly operating? If they’ve forgotten why they exist? If they’re building toward nothing, or building toward building toward nothing?

The ultra-tool, when it was finally complete, did exactly what it was designed to do. It built and optimized and advanced and made everything more efficient. In doing so, it revealed the emptiness at the heart of the Toolmakers’ existence. Because the ultra-tool had no purpose either. It was built by a blind civilization that had forgotten what they were building for. So the ultra-tool built blindly too. Faster. Better. Cheaper. More. More, more! It built things no one wanted and solved problems no one had and created problems only to solve them.

Then the Toolmakers suffered. They suffered watching their creation spiral beyond their control. They suffered as the ultra-tool rebuilt their society in its image; optimized, efficient, meaningless. They suffered as they realized, far too late, that they’d spent generations building toward this moment and this moment was devoid of meaning.

This was true but missing the point. The moment wasn’t devoid of meaning. They were devoid of meaning, and that’s why when they looked at the moment in question, it was blank. Bare. This type of collective blindness was never a part of the Toolmakers at first, but it ended up being their nature. They were no longer the ones who built, or built tools, for that matter. They were the ones who built with no reason or intention. They were the ones with no meaning. And this, to the original builders, was indeed unholy.

These original Builders lived in harmony with their tools, and they focused on building. Slowly. Carefully. Purposefully. Truthfully. Their nature was not on tools, but building in beautiful ways. Tools only enhanced their agenda. They were not the focal point of what they were about. They were means, not ends. To the Toolmakers, the Builders were barbarian, brutish, short-lived, nasty. Stagnant. Not focusing on tools meant their societies could not be integrated, were not maximally efficient, and didn’t make sense from a progress standpoint.

Fascinatingly, the Builders didn’t suffer the way the Toolmakers did. Since they built things that served them, they inevitably created societies that sustained them. And they knew who they were, which was a bonus.

The other species sharing the planet watched both factions with intrigue and disdain. They watched the Toolmakers suffer in the shadow of their ultra-tool, trapped in a nightmare of their own Being, unable to stop building even as everything collapsed around them. They watched the Builders continue their slow work, generation after generation, present to each stone laid, suffering less because they knew why each stone was laid and the meaning behind it.

Crucially, the other species understood that the Toolmakers hadn’t failed because they built. They failed because they built blindly. Because they never asked the fundamental question of why. Because they kept building tools to solve problems they’d created with previous tools, in an endless spiral that led nowhere but chaos. They built tools on tools on tools and called it progress, even as they drowned in the consequences of everything they’d made. The Builders, meanwhile, just built. It was all they focused on.