Zorgon the Incredible

Here’s the short story of Zorgon the Incredible.

Actually, rationalist historians claimed he was actually called Zorgon the Inedible (after all, there is no evidence that he was eaten), but realist hysterians just screamed long enough that the subject was dropped… Some fights just can’t be won.

Now, Zorgon was a lumbering mess of a creature. Even the Hysterians didn’t disgree on that, thank Ziblon (the God of Strong Earplugs). But as such, Zorgon was popular. It was an era when lumbering was trendy, and messy lumbering was fantastically cool, so nobody’s really suprised about that. But no, it was not the lumberingness of Zorgon which made him a histoyrectical figure, it was the vacuum he created in his wake through the passage of time.

It was not a normal kind of vacuum. Not the vacuum which we all feel physically, when shoved out of an airlock on Space-Lab-9. Nor the emotional vacuum one feels when the wife runs off with your car. No. It was a vacuum hitherto unbeknown in the civilizaton of the Ziblonic 4 A.D: Vacuum Flatuations.

Vacuum Flatuations are now understood to be a particularly dangerous form of “vacant reasoning”. Today, our children learn to detect and reject vacant reasoning. But then, nobody knew, and all were sucked into the bane of Zorgon’s VFs.

As a form of pseudo intelligent thought, ZVF’s are meant to disperse opposing viewpoints by meaningless statements whilst impressing the undecided through vague but inspiring bullshit. Kinda like this story, in fact. Classic examples of ZVFs are:

Our experience shows…
Our colleagues in production…

Actually, these are the only two examples ever recorded in Zorgon’s lifetime. And science today doesn’t understand how these could have inspired such a massive following. But our experience has shown that we are not immune to what our colleagues in production are trying to say. In any case, Zorgon managed to build a huge network of believers. Somewhat susceptible were members of the Buck-Passing Party or the Responsibility-Shedding Group. Most spectacular was the absorption of the “Path of Least Resistance” rebels into Zorgon’s rhetoric complex.

By the way, certain similarities can be found in the nomadic Salez-Forss swarm colony near Ribulon 7, who spread extravagant superlatives throughout corporate civilization about their A.R.S.E. (Arbitrary Reasoning for Stupid Errors).

Zorgon’s amazing popularity came to an abrupt end when the People’s Army of Ambitious Individuals started to publicly ask who these “colleagues of production” were, and what specific examples his “experience showed”. Zorgon was quickly thrown into the Dungeon of Tape Changers where he forever more is changing those tapes.

Recovery was SWIFT.

Kirk out.