What follows is a fable I wrote to visualize the development of progressivism in western society and how I see its future.

This is the last day of the old world.

Ahead of you, the Beast moves through the ruins. Each step shakes the ground beneath your feet. It is vast, powerful, and ancient. It has no mind, no mercy, no purpose. Only an endless, aching hunger.

Once, it was small. Four centuries ago, it crawled from the earth, burning with a strange and captivating light. The townsfolk gathered round. They marveled at its words of justice, its promises of a perfected world.

But paradise, it told them, requires sacrifice. The new world could only rise from the ashes of the old. These promises carried a hidden hunger. And hunger must be fed.

They started with the stones—the monuments their fathers had raised. Then they tore the beams from the roofs that sheltered them. They laid the crowns of their kings at its feet and burned the books that held their history. And when its hunger was still not sated, they brought their children.

With each gift, it grew. And with each growth, it demanded more—not with threats, but with the voice of virtue. To refuse the Beast was to be cruel. To question it was to be wicked. And so they fed it, believing themselves righteous.

It grew fat on their good intentions. By the time they learned to fear it, fear was no longer enough. The Beast had outgrown their walls, their weapons, and their courage. Now, it un-makes their world.

You stand alone on the hill in a final point of defiance. It towers above you so frighteningly more massive than you are. In your hand, a single arrow, tipped with poison. You will have only one shot.

Before you, two paths unfold:

In one, the arrow finds its mark on its head—and the Beast dies by your hand. The town and its people are saved.

In the other, you miss—and the Beast devours what remains.

But then—you feel it. The trembling beneath your feet. The ground shudders under a weight it was never meant to bear. Each step of the Beast cracks the foundation deeper. Each swing of its bloated limbs shatters stone that has stood for centuries.

The Beast, in its hunger, digs its own grave.

Finally, the world breaks open. The Beast roars not in victory, but in confusion, as the earth it was devouring gives way beneath it.

You fall—but the Beast falls faster. Centuries of gorging have made it too heavy for anything to hold. It plummets, massive and helpless, back into the dark it came from.

You catch a ledge. You are light enough to cling to life. The Beast is not.

CRASH

A single, powerful impact rolls through the hollow earth like justice. Then silence.

The Beast could never win. It was doomed from birth—bound by its nature to consume the very ground beneath its feet.

When you climb back to the surface, there is no town. Only ash and iron and the bones of beautiful things. Yet you are alive.

Together with the other survivors, you spend years filling the pit. You entomb the Beast's corpse under a mountain of stone, sealing away its body and the very idea of it.

On that barren ground you build anew—a city of light, order, reason, and beauty. A place where the story of the Beast is carved into every foundation stone, so that no future child will mistake its voice for kindness or virtue ever again.