(Fiction!)
We are the Confederation of Teachers. We exist to guide and preserve society, not just of one group, but of all people, for the benefit of all. We came together because we believe society is important, but society was in grave danger of sinking into the same barbarism that nearly consumed it four generations before our foundation. All of our learning could have been lost; generations could have struggled merely to survive to adulthood, as most have throughout most of history; and society might perish on Earth, its cradle and its grave.
We were formed as a Third World War menaced the world, sending waves of refugees out from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Crimea; as the European Union, which had safeguarded peace during those four generations, tottered; as a dangerous madman who loved only power was near being elected the leader of the most powerful state in history; and as the Industrial Age, powered by fossil fuels, steel, and concrete, drew to its filthy close. Suicide and obesity grew more widespread year by year, and as the biosphere collapsed, irreplaceable living species were lost at a rate not seen since the last asteroid impact. Yet human life expectancy had never been greater, literacy had never been higher, and science progressed at a rate never before seen.
We recognized that the existing social structure for guiding the course of civilization, a bureaucratic extension of the violent dominance hierarchies and genocidal territorial dynamics of ape troops, were both manifestly inadequate to the task of preventing total destruction and dangerously unstable in the face of nascent technologies such as nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, ubiquitous communication, space travel, self-replicating machinery, solar energy, universal computation, and artificial general intelligence. So we came together to create new resilient structures so that society could survive the most disruptive era of change in tens of millions of years.
We seek the welfare of everyone, not the advantage of one tribe or nation over another. For this purpose, we study, and out of gratitude to those who have taught us, we teach others, so that they too may become teachers. For this purpose, we consult among ourselves to determine the best course of action for society, and then we guide society to take that course. For that purpose we investigate the truth, each of us constantly seeking to become wiser, more ethical, and more capable, and each supporting the others in this. We serve a higher purpose than any company, state, or political party, because our loyalty is not merely to ourselves but to society as a whole.
We Teachers are all kinds of people: intelligent and dumb, female and male, black and white, young and old, rich and poor, from every country and every social class. So far, we are all human, but if we encounter nonhuman people, we will accept them too. What counts is what each of us contributes to the goals of the Confederation of Teachers. We do our best to value the contributions of each member without regard to who originated them, struggling against our prejudices which corrupt us into listening only to the words of those we already know and respect.
To achieve these ends, we
Scientia est eorum, quæ sunt cum demonstratione.