For some reason I've been thinking about D'Anna again (partially I'm sure due to the recent release of The Golden Compass, the source material of which features an explicit parallel to Eve). And I think I'm able to better detail just what the difference between the three (original Eve, Battlestar's D'Anna, and His Dark Materials' Lyra) is, and why I prefer D'Anna's story. I'm not going to make a lot of sense here but I'll give it a shot.

Who does this guy Rawls think he is, Karl Marx?

An equal society can't work because an equal society would be based on cooperation rather than competition. That's what the economists tells us and they are our prophets (the prophets of profit, hoho), capitalism (or consumerism, really), our religion.

More, that's what the paradigm tells us. The narrative that drives our culture. Our entire societal being is based on the idea that cooperation and equality leads to stagnation, that progress and advancement only results from competition--more than that, only from competition for monetary and/or material reward. This is the essence of "Family": beneath all the rhetoric, what is most sacred is property.

In the beginning there was the Word.

Our world begins as language, thoughts, symbols, scraps of meaning communicated between the scattered identities that make up each individual. To live we organize them into coherent structures, forms, sequences, patterns. We call these structures stories or narratives, and from them we construct the meanings of our lives.

Everything is a story, a narrative arc from beginning to middle to end, inciting incident to rising action to climax to falling action to resolution. Everything, from the new blockbuster movie to the report on the evening news to our daily routines, is a story. That is to say, it is not reality that is made up of stories, but our interpretations of it. Our world is language, which become stories.

I can't just write like I used to.

In the beginning there was the Word.

Not the program, that bloated Microsoft contraption (bloated like all Microsoft contraptions and forced upon a marketplace begging for more, grown fat and complacent on the bloat, completely ignorant of any alternatives--the fast food of software, if you will), but Logos, symbols, language, communication, syntax.