Richards & LaMeinge

Sterquilinium
"But what is morality," he said, "but an bottomless bucket into which every man pours the dregs of his cup. Moral high ground? Ha! Forget it! That hill is slippery with the defecation of its ten-thousand previous occupants! Give me the castle of ethics instead. It is clean and has been empty for many years. It is strong and unyielding - its foundation never changes nor stirs, for it was constructed not on the swamp of good and bad, but on the bedrock of right and wrong."

"You're an idiot," LaMeinge said in return, "what will you cite now? Natural Law? The Social Contract?! It's not worth the paper it's not written on! Will you bring in Rawls with his idiotic veil of ignorance? Where is this bedrock, eh? It's a castle in the sky, my friend, a castle in the sky."

"And what would you offer," Richards answered, his eyes laughing.

"What would I offer? Absurdity first and the people second!"

"Two unrelated themes"

"Unrelated to one of you, who insist on structure and movement. My philosophy is amorphous, which is why you'll never defeat it. You cannot grab it and you cannot aim at it. It moves, it shifts. Its purpose and method are never constant. That is the absurdity. Yet its target never changes. The people! The People! The PEOPLE! Don't you understand? We win every time because we know the game. Change! Something New, new new. They swallow it every time. Idiots!"

"Wrong LaMeinge. We win. Not because you lose, but because the prize you choose is worthless. You and your kind will always exist - and you will claim each age as your own. So be it. We don't care. We exist at your periphery, and we control you, not because we wish to, but because we cannot help but do so. And without it you would die. The parasite cannot exist without the hunter. Without us you people would starve."

"And without the people, you would starve too."

"Yes, but we know it, and they don't. Hence our power"