Rootkit 11
Rootkit 11 states that 'In the good world wrongdoers make amends before the tears dry.' It is TRUE. It is the eleventh statement of the Rootkit Test.
Explanation of answer to Rootkit 11
Quoted from Puzzle One.
One of the things we had to do to become healthy again was change the way we thought about justice. In hanyo town, the purpose of the law is to punish (and obsess about) the wrongdoer, not to heal and help the victim, who is mostly a loser. Indeed the whole business of getting justice is usually as painful for the victim as the crime itself, and feels like a continuation of the crime. If caught, wrongdoers are allowed to hide from their shame in jails of varying plushness, while the unremedied pain of the victim, who is left alone in the world’s eye to suffer more shame, impoverishment and trouble, hurts and twists her. The victim knows that this shame that no one will take away from her is really the true penalty for the criminal, and she does not understand why it is on her shoulders and not on his.
The reason is simple: she is the one who can take the wrongdoer down, so the system, which is designed to protect the hanyos, cripples her to protect him. By denying her justice, the system forces her to look for revenge and pushes the dark matter of dread into her soul: dread of having to be a victim forever. Revenge is war, and therefore in hanyo town it is a game the hanyos love to play. Why do the justice-givers of hanyo town ignore the victim? Because ‘losers’ don’t count in hanyo town. In fact, ‘losers’ are tormented for the entertainment of non-losers until they accept their loserness or decide to become ‘winners’ by doing wrong in turn. Then the hanyos can take them down and celebrate another victory against ‘evil’. The hanyos have arranged things this way because they need winning like a drug: without a regular fix of fighting ‘evil’, they feel purposeless and empty. For these reasons they will always use their system of justice to make monsters.
In the survivarium, we devised a completely different system, one based on the idea that the first task for everyone when something goes wrong is to help and heal the victim. The wrongdoer is mostly ‘punished’ by having to help in that process, either directly or indirectly. The shamesticky is the first step, and ninety percent of deeds that break happiness are resolved through stickies. That leaves the troublesome ten percent. For this, as I said earlier, we have karmatulas. To prevent everyone wasting their time debating unnecessary issues, we have lists of actions in the pink, green, indigo, yellow, orange and red that carry automatic sticky-threads, and these are debated, revised and agreed on by people at regular intervals. Common business like cleaning public places, making food precursors, scrubbing air, keeping things safe and running the systems is fairly easy to set sticky lists for.
Karma that involves people interacting with people, particularly purple, blue, violet, red and white karmas, are trickier, and in these karmas we leave more things open for karmatulas to handle as the situation requires. Red karma features in both lists because it is the karma of cleanup and correction, so in a sense it is part of all the other karmas. You could call it the karma of keeping the pinch tight.
Most of the settled hates in the world have been meticulously built out of a thousand bruises, all of which add up to a kind of insanity. We stop the process at the first bruise: we never allow anyone to be so hurt and abandoned that all they can want is revenge, and if they thoughtlessly try to take revenge in the heat of the moment, we sticky them for it. Also note that we don’t waste time worrying about motive. In hanyo town, killing someone by accident is regarded as less bad than doing it on purpose, and people see merit in arguing about which case they’re dealing with. This opens up a big, maggoty wound where hanyos can raise their hands to the sky and wail, ‘But I didn’t know!’ and get away with murder.
In the survivarium, if you are carrying out a task that might endanger someone, you had better be very careful indeed, or you will be stickied. If you are not careful, we will not waste time wondering whether the person who got crushed under the rock you so carelessly dropped was just unlucky in being around you or was someone you actually wanted dead. If you dropped the rock, that’s bad enough. Which is why you don’t get to carry out tasks like that in the Nest unless you have the relevant deep orange karma, which means you’re good at keeping people safe when you work. If things still go wrong, because accidents do happen, we will all of us mourn the consequences, and people will fearlessly comfort you rather than blame you, since your karma weave will show that you took all precautions.
The survivarium is not a fantasy world where everyone is automatically good and kind. We often get shamestickied, but it is usually for carelessness, thoughtlessness, laziness or greed, four human vices that will never be eradicated. The other, more dramatic vices are built up when someone’s thoughtlessness is allowed to break someone else’s world, and then the victim feels justified in being thoughtless to ten other people, or plotting and scheming to break the world of the wrongdoer, which is your world and mine too. We just don’t let that happen.
In hanyo town, both wrongdoing and disease are seen as enemies in a war, and a war is no fun unless the enemy fights back. That’s why hanyos do nothing until evil, or disease, grows until it’s big enough to put up a fight, and then they swing into action like superheroes. Their story is all about them, not the hurt people or the sick people, and often they get praised and paid even if the sick and the hurt people die. We think this to be a form of madness.
