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The City of Samsara: an Allegory

"...A walled town called Samsara sits in the middle of a plain. The plain contains other walled towns, some of which contain good people who want to communicate and do business with the people in Samsara, other towns contain people who want to rob or abuse the people in Samsara. It's sometimes difficult to tell which is which, and this is why all the towns on the plain have walls.

The road to Samsara leads off from the vast network of roads that links together all the towns on the plain and, on the approach to the town limits, splits up into several little roads that lead into Samsara through different gates in the wall.

Above each gate is a label which dictates who can come through it. The most well-trodden gates have labels like "http" and "ftp" - the guards who man this gate only give cursory glances to each traveller to make sure they look more-or-less like the kind of traveller who should be passing through each gate. The guards know that these travellers are very important to Samsara and are happy to take the risk that these travellers won't be hiding unwanted passengers and that when the travellers arrive within Samsara they'll be strictly monitored and contained.

For the longest time the road to Samsara was closed. Travellers of all kinds had no ability to reach the town, they didn't even know it existed. No-one in Samsara was concerned with the gates in the walls; everyone looked inward.

Then the road was opened, but it was a very bad road full of deep potholes and it was only opened for small periods of time. Travellers were taxed heavily and so only the very important ones that could move quickly and avoid all the potholes ever made it to the city walls. Travellers that had made it this far had already proved their worth and were rarely questioned. It was rare if any of them caused problems - typically the evil ones were too slow and fat to ever make it down the road.

After a revolutionary upheavel within Samsara it was decided that the road should be widened and more thouroughly maintained and, importantly for the story, left open most of the time. A guard post was set up at the point where the road split and headed off to each gate in the town wall. The purpose of this post was to close all of the gates (for the town had many gates to accomodate the many needs of the people in Samsara) that weren't specifically reserved for a purpose. So all the gates were shut apart from the main ones, like 'ftp' and 'http' which were required daily by the consumers in Samsara.

And for a while, everything was okay.

The myriad evil travellers regularly tested the gates at the guard-post, found them to be secure and were turned back to go and find less well-protected towns to infiltrate. The citizens within Samsara were carefull of the business they conducted and of the communications they requestsed; they were a modest people who were satisfied experiencing a nice spectrum of the world outside their walls.

But soon, attracted by advertising that they could not avoid and by tales of wonder they recieved from other towns, the citizens became curious. They began to demand the guard post let in more and more dodgy-looking characters: huge parcels of materials with which to erect new buildings; whole troupes of acrobats to keep them entertained; shows of exotic and scary animals from the other side of the plane.

The people of Samsara became impatient but wanted to stay, above all, cheap. They allowed in cut-price warez, low-quality entertainers, broken animals like bent cats and empty horses and builders that made mysterious things that they didn't request. These dodgy travellers had the opportunity to abuse their position in the town and all the citizens could hope was that they didn't do anything too nasty.

Quickly it became too much. The people realised their mistake but by this time it was too late. To solve their problems they had to hire goons: blunt, crafty men who knew all too well about the dangers that existed outside the walls. They ruthlessly hunted down and killed the spies who had infiltrated Samsara and set alight the hidden structures that had been erected during Samarasa's naivete.

This solved the problem, but at a cost. The goons installed themseleves into positions of power within Samsara, demanding the attention and resources of the people. Samsara had become protected, but at the cost of aligning themselves with the goon mafia, who had control over many of the cities in the plain.