The Coloured Boxes - Applebee's Field Notes

Field Note #7,412 - Extended

The Coloured Boxes

observations on the human selection ritual

Day 847. Today I witnessed the ritual they call "voting."

They queue for hours. Mark paper with pencils. Drop it in a coloured box. Then... wait.

The boxes come in colours. Humans fight over which colour is correct.

They argue as if the colour itself will solve the enclosure's problems.

Jenkins arrived. He often provides... "context."

Applebee, you have to understand — before the boxes, there were kings.

Before. One human decided everything. For everyone.

If the king was wise — good. If cruel — suffering. If incompetent — famine. No appeal. No recourse.

For most of human history, power was inherited, seized, or divine. The idea that ordinary people should choose was radical.

The breakthrough. What if everyone got a say?

Revolutionary idea: each voice counts the same. Rich, poor. Smart, foolish. One person, one vote.

Democracy was a breakthrough. Imperfect, but it distributed power from the few to the many. That was genuinely new.

Applebee considers. Then asks the obvious question.

But Jenkins... the humans who win the box ritual — they don't need to prove they can actually DO anything. They just need to win the ritual.

The incentive is to WIN, not to GOVERN. Getting votes and solving problems are different skills.

The trap. The same breakthrough creates new problems.

Campaigns reward drama. Governance requires nuance. They're opposites.

Applebee noticed something else.

The cubs don't get to vote. Why?

They're... not ready. They'd vote for candy and cartoons.

Applebee pressed the question.

And the adults... when they vote for whoever promises to lower their taxes while somehow improving their services...

...

That's... different.

Is it?

The paradox. Democracy was both breakthrough AND bottleneck.

It removed tyrants. It created demagogues. It gave everyone voice. It drowned out expertise. Both are true.

Jenkins took a long sip of his coffee.

We haven't found anything better. Not yet. That's the honest answer.

Every alternative we've tried was worse. Dictators, committees, technocrats — all corrupted faster.

Applebee wrote in the margin of his notes:

"The coloured boxes are not the disease.
They are the best bandage humans have found so far.
The disease is that they needed a bandage at all."

The problem isn't which box. The problem is the enclosure itself.
Fix the enclosure, and maybe the boxes become less important.