[screenplay] man and the ascended beings

Just finished watching Stargate, the Ark of Truth and the mythology made me start thinking just how much more bizarre the reality of what did occur in the beginning might have been.

Here's a sci-fi plot off the top of the head.

Imagine that there are two types of ascended beings. The first lot created Man and just as a parent loves his child, wants to see him grow, learn, develop, evolve, not by being directed in every action like a robot but by imparting a code to live by, a sort of self-regulatory mechanism, so Man himself was given a lot of rope, only to be tapped back on course a few times. Freedom within limits and oodles of love.

The other type of ascended being recognizes the danger lurking inside Man, the potential power of combined good. You see it everywhere - things being built, communities, families and so on. Get enough humans combining and the collective power is awesome, as long as it is in free association. The downside of this is that humans who are used to this sort of freedom are not particularly amenable to command and control schemes.

Recognizing that humans are susceptible though to the "balance of opposing forces" idea, the Dark Ascended devise a nifty logo and suggest the first teaching - that for every white action, you need to do a black one to "spiritually balance it".

Thus the principle of evil is implanted.

The second teaching is that the things taught to you by the white side, authority figures and your parents are restrictive, anachronistic and boring - that there is really only one rule in life: "Do as thou will." So all human activity is taken to excess and called good. However, as Anakin Skywalker and many others across the galaxy found to their cost and that of billions of others, unrestrained action actually weakens a person's character and makes him more susceptible to the Dark Ascended.

The DAs also recognize that if they can get enough humans worshipping them, there is immense power in that, allowing them to fulfil their real goal of enslaving and slaughtering Earth's population, the original threat. The only way to get Man to knuckle under is to first create a utopian ideal he'll cling to - the fair redistribution of wealth to all humans who will now live in an ascendant paradise, with no war, no misery and no suffering. Call it, for want of a better term, the Illumined Way.

The Dark Ascended now point to the disaster that unbridled greed, hedonism and lack of self-control have led to and say the only way to get Man back on course to the Utopian nirvana, where all men are brothers and share equally in the collective wealth, is for each person to voluntarily sign away his freedoms and give a pledge of loyalty to the brave new world.

Having got most humans on the planet to sign freely, having coerced almost all the rest, there are just a few rebels left who support the white side and the Old Ways - they're hunted down across the galaxy as insurgents and terrorists and that's where the film ends.

Not a bad plot, d'you think?