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← The Jester Wing · Exhibit the first

☉

For the instruction of children & other doubters

A Catechism
of the Church of the
Market-as-Physics

Q. Who made the market?
A. No one made the market. The market is, as gravity is. To ask who made it is to confess you are not yet grown.
Q. Then whom do I thank for my station?
A. You thank the Market, which sorted you justly, the way water finds its level and asks no one's leave.
Q. And the man with ten thousand granaries — who gave him these?
A. No one gave. He earned them, or his fathers earned them, which is the same as earning.
Q. Why am I hungry beside his granary?
A. The granary is a signal, child. Your hunger is also a signal. Heed it, and strive.
Q. It does not feel fair.
A. Fairness is a feeling of childhood, like the fear of the dark. You will grow out of it — or you will remain a child.
Q. My neighbours and I outnumber him a thousand to one.
A. Numbers are vulgar. The Market does not count heads; it weighs coins. Commit this article to heart, for it is the dearest of them all.
Q. Might we, together, change it?
A. One does not change the weather. One dresses for it, and is grateful for the parts that are mild.
Q. Who profits from my believing all of this?
(No answer is appointed for this question. Here endeth the lesson.)

Go in peace, and compete.

Pinned to the church door by persons unknown. The Church teaches that the arrangement is physics. The Leveling teaches that it was a surrender, and that surrenders can be reversed. The joke is on the doctrine, never the believer — and the one question the catechism cannot answer is the whole of the argument.