Welcome to the graduation for the School of Order and Chaos. This is your commencement speech. If you are looking for the commencement speech for the School of Chaos and Order, you should be in Moorcock Auditorium. Please go there now.
Everyone settled? Good, then let’s start this. Or end it rather. If you’ve successfully graduated without cheating, you know they’re basically the same thing. If any of you are using multiverse pathways to revisit a fond memory, welcome back.
When this school was established, there was much hot debate (and cold refusal) of the idea that Order and Chaos could be taught and mentored within the same institution. As I was on both sides of the debate, I’ve been invited to give the commencement speech to its first graduating class.
Pause for laughter.
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t meant to read that part out loud.
Anyway, we proved them all, most of all me, wrong. Each of you here now, engineers and visionaries, clerics and anarchists, accountants and marketers, are on your own path into the world after having spent years studying and honing your skills with and against one another. For having survived that alone, you deserve congratulations. Unfortunately, there is much work to be done. There are challenges big and small.
For you radicals of Chaos, there are authoritarian regimes that subjugate their citizens, corporations who crush everything in their mindless pursuit of profit, autocrats that use nuclear holocaust as a bargaining chip and those that prop them up, buying and selling politicians in order to protect and project their own singular plans. There are dictators in every shape and form waiting for you to break their tyrannical hold.
For you disciples of Law, there are those that would use violence rather than reason to get their way. There are people who would tear down venerable institutions that protect the innocent because it is politically expedient. You stand in the way of those who would sell revolution from the safety of their palaces.
If you’ve come this far, I know you have big ambitions, but I urge you not to forget about the individuals, the people downtrodden by the systems and individuals you wish to destroy (or reform, depending on which side of the aisle you’re sitting). Most are merely trying to survive. Even those who seem willing participants in the forces you seek to countervail may, in fact, be captives of them. There are people all over the world that would like to change the systems, norms, and brutality they participate in, but fear if they make too much noise the forces their lives rely upon will crush them. These individuals may be your greatest allies or lead a mob to your door, depending on how you treat them. Your actions will have more effect on them than any on those that pull the levers of power, even if you bring the powerful to their knees.
So go forth and work your magic. Bring balance to the world. And if you do, you will accomplish what no other generation before you has.
Good luck.
See the author’s published work here.
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Well done!
Thank you, madam!