On Mattle-Brattle there are five continents. Each continent has a leader, each leader has a slogan, each slogan has a melody. Most of the leaders are kind because their insides are okay. One of the leader’s insides is all mixed up with chemicals in the wrong places. All the leaders desire this: tinkles. The universe is choked with trillions of photons that pring off surfaces and wiggle in different ways and some organisms suck these in to build pictures. The occupants of Mattle-Brattle don’t suck in photons to build pictures. Their closest sun is so far away that the photons in their parts aren’t good for building pictures.

Here’s how it is: one of the leader’s of Mattle-Brattle has their insides all mixed-up so that what their head should be saying – things like: “Life for all,” or, “Wonderful the world is without an eye to see,” are instead all this: “Your tinkles are mine.” All the tinkles on the continent were in one giant hard disk, which only the mixed-up leader of Mattle-Brattle had the key to. Tinkles are vibrations of air molecules in a very specific order so that when they are close to things like ears, they become music. If the vibrations are erratic, static, too tight to pull apart – these are not sounds anyone wants near their ears. These are not tinkles.

Here’s the thing: tinkles are good for the economy. The economy of Mattle-Brattle had grown for the last five years. A coffee was eight-tenths of a tinkle. Four years ago, a coffee was five-eights of a tinkle. This was called inflation. It meant that everyone would increase their prices slowly, so that no one would notice, and the banks would print a few more tinkles slowly, so that no one would notice. The mixed-up Mattle-Brattle leader had forgotten about inflation, or, they didn’t consider inflation an issue, or, probably both are true. As they owned all the tinkles on the continent, no one had to worry about whether things were expensive or cheap. This was a service, they thought, that they provided their citizens. This was their service: relief from the burden of shopping.

If someone offers a tinkle for bread it would be nice to know if the transacted tinkle is a real tinkle. The Mattle-Brattle bank invented a process called minting to solve this issue. A very complicated tone is weaved deep in the tinkle so that it can only be heard with an ocular-enhancer, which is a type of amplifier for sounds for the ear. All cashiers wear ocular-enhancers. Bread does not require minting because it can be tasted to determine its quality. Tinkles cannot be tasted, hence ocular-enhancers are worn.

Understand this: the Mattle-Brattle leader with the mixed up chemicals wanted all the tinkles for themselves. They listened to tinkles from sunrise to sunset and they never grew tired of that tinkle tune. That’s what happens when your chemicals are mixed up: you never grow tired of the same tinkle tune. The citizens that shared the continent with the greedy Mattle-Brattle leader would have preferred to have their tinkles to themselves. They didn’t think that one person should be in charge of listening to all the tinkles. If they said this, something like, “I don’t think one person should be in charge of listening to all the tinkles,” they would be shot. No one said anything about the tinkles, but they thought an awful lot about them, especially when they were hungry and wished they could buy bread.

A small ship arrived on the planet of Mattle-Brattle one morning. It contained an army of liberators. These was the Intergalactic Liberation Army, or ILA. ILA had things like micro-nuclear guns and aspiration inverters, which inverted one’s aspirations. The mixed-up leader sent their army to kill the ILA, which they didn’t do because their aspirations were inverted. They now aspired to be dancers, painters, and comedians – anything, but a soldier with a gun to kill. The ILA then inverted the mixed-up Mattle-Brattle leader and flew off quick because they had another planet to liberate before tomorrow. With their aspirations inverted and their chemicals spun up wrong, the leader had only one thing on their mind and it was this: philanthropy. This is a complex word invented by people with lots of money to make it sound like the management of giving away their wealth was far more complex than just giving it away.

“Do you give away any of your wealth to the poor?”

“Why yes, but it’s a tricky business being a philanthropist.”

A philanthropist is someone who partakes in the act of philanthropy.

The Mattle-Brattle leader was riddled with philanthropy. Where they had been stuffed right to the toes with greed, they now only wished to unstuff themselves and throw it to the wind. First, all the tinkles were given away and to each person equally. Everyone, with tinkles in hand, ran to the bakers and bought bread! The streets were tight-knit with queues running out of doors as the bakers tried to give everyone their bread as quick as possible. Everyone ate bread that evening. The next morning the economy collapsed, which meant that people with the most tinkles, like politicians and business owners, were concerned that they would not be able to sustain their philanthropic habits and would look bad, so they came up with an excuse by using a word. This word was: collapse.

Over tea and halves of bread, Mattle-Brattle’s talked. They said things like:

“I can’t find work.”

“That’s because the economy has collapsed.”

The Mattle-Brattles came to accept their misfortunes in life. An unlucky fall, a lost bet, a lost pet, it was all the economic collapse. Nothing could be done about it. They spent some time looking for where the collapse of the economy was. Some thought it might be in the sewers because no one had been there in a while. But they found nothing. Someone suggested to look under this stack of papers they found in the desk of the old mixed-up leader of the Mattle-Brattle continent. Again, it didn’t seem to be there. Eventually, ILA returned after completing a streak of liberations along the asteroid belt that was in the Mattle-Brattle solar system. They helped the Mattle-Brattles find the collapse of the economy. It was in a cluster of neurons in the brain of each and every Mattle-Brattle. “How can we fix that?” asked the Mattle-Brattles to ILA. And ILA replied by inverting the aspirations of all the Mattle-Brattles by amplifying their guns with a large dish from space.

When they went to work the next morning, rather than talk about the collapse of the economy, the Mattle-Brattles talked about things like: pay raises, professional careers, mortgages, business tactics. Every fifth word they spoke was ‘tinkle.’ According to a plot with lines drawn left-to-right, the economy was aflame. They saw such a bright-burning economy and so ILA left again, to liberate a moon which had been trapped by a planet. There was plenty of bread at breakfast on Mattle-Brattle. Some Mattle-Brattles enjoyed eating bread so much that they wanted to eat it all the time. In fact, they wanted to eat all of the bread. Here’s what they did: they became politicians. They became popular with their bread-first slogans. They became the leader of a Mattle-Brattle continent. And, because they had done such a swell job of convincing everyone they were so good at dealing with bread, they convinced every Mattle-Brattle resident to give them all their bread, which they kept in one large safe with only one key, which they kept to themselves.