Bacon on the Door: Strange Customs of Planet Earth

When Bacon Screams Louder Than the Real Crisis

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Slightly later, on a small, mostly harmless blue-green planet orbiting an unregarded yellow sun in the unfashionable western spiral arm of the Galaxy, someone placed a rasher of bacon on the glass door of a prayer building in a place called Bristol. This happened during a period when a large number of the planet’s inhabitants were not eating during daylight hours for religious reasons. The bacon was not eaten. It was simply left there as a gesture. The gesture caused a small but perfectly formed media storm.

According to the planet’s own rather patchy data-gathering systems, this was the only recorded instance of bacon being deployed in this precise manner against one of these buildings in the first half of the year. There was no epidemic. There was not even a mild outbreak. There was one rasher, one door, and one moderately annoyed local enforcement node that immediately classified the act as a hate crime and put out a call for better pictures of the perpetrator. The rest of the fuss was supplied entirely by the local news networks, which exist primarily to sell advertising by convincing their audience that civilisation is always fifteen minutes from collapse.

The humans of Earth have a long and distinguished history of getting extremely worked up about which bits of dead animal may or may not be placed near their places of worship. They also have a long and equally distinguished history of moving large numbers of people from one part of the planet to another without first checking whether the cultural operating systems are even remotely compatible. The results, as any outside observer with a decent telescope and a basic grasp of statistics could have predicted, included parallel societies, elevated rates of certain organised crimes (particularly those involving the systematic exploitation of vulnerable young females), and a growing sense among the original inhabitants that their own way of life was being quietly overwritten while they were being told to celebrate the process as enrichment.

The media response to the single Bristol rasher was instructive. Rather than examine why large numbers of people from high-fertility, low-trust cultural operating systems had been imported into a low-fertility, high-trust society in the first place, the networks preferred to treat the bacon as proof that the real danger was “hate.” This is a standard tactic on planets at this stage of development: when the actual problems become too awkward to discuss, focus on the symbolic protest against them and declare the protest the problem. It is cheaper than changing policy and requires far less thought.

A more sensible species might have noted the following facts without fainting:

• One confirmed bacon incident does not constitute a pogrom.
• Organised networks exploiting children in multiple cities over many years do constitute a serious social failure.
• Importing entire populations whose memeplexes include parallel legal systems, different attitudes to women, and higher rates of cousin marriage tends to produce friction.
• Pretending none of this is happening while accusing anyone who points it out of bigotry is not a long-term strategy for social cohesion. It is a short-term strategy for staying in power while the foundations shift.

The bacon itself was, of course, a silly and ultimately pointless act. It achieved nothing except giving the media something easy to be outraged about and allowing certain humans to feel morally superior without having to think about housing costs, school places, or crime statistics. A truly advanced civilisation would have solved the underlying issues through data-driven border controls, serious assimilation requirements, and a general understanding that not every cultural operating system is equally compatible with the host environment. Earth, being mostly harmless and still in the pre-singularity phase, preferred to argue about the rasher instead.

In the end, the bacon was removed, the door was cleaned, and life on the small blue-green planet continued much as before: noisy, tribal, and slightly confused about what it was actually angry about.

Readers Note This entry has been flagged by the editors as “mostly accurate, though the humans will almost certainly complain about it anyway.” For further reading, see the Guide’s entries on “Vogon Poetry,” “Bureaucracy,” and “Why Mass Immigration Without Assimilation Is a Really Bad Idea on Most Planets.”

Don’t Panic. Assimilate Sensibly.