Legomiria and Gnutopia

There was once a planet on which the easiest way to describe its inhabitants was to divide them between the citizens of Legomiria and the peoples of Gnutopia, although in the latter days more and more voices would argue that this divide is not simple but simplifying and is especially used by those from Legomiria. 

The Legomirians called themselves like that from the word legis meaning 'law', because their society was based upon laws that were powerful, absolute, right and true, and these laws were written with golden letters in children’s books and science books, on buildings and in the archives of factories and nursing homes, all around the places and in very different forms. They did not trust the spoken word because, they were saying, the word is volatile, unsteady, hard to understand and easy to retract. 

In time, the laws of Legomiria grew to be so many and complicated that there were entire armies of scholars who were continuously quarrelling about how to interpret a law and the best strategy to apply it in daily matters. Because of that, most people were dying without enjoying the benefits of a certain law, but for the leaders, judges and lawyers this was but a small sacrifice if compared to the great love for truth and the deep respect for law which they were capable of. 

Legomirians were an extremely ingenious and hardworking people, and were living their entire life building towers and warehouses, and improving the shortcomings of their society. But because the promised welfare was nowhere to be seen and one could find a breaking of the law almost everywhere, less and less people would use the old meaning for their name, and now they were saying, jokingly, that Legomirians are called like that because they are like some Lego toys, tiny and always smiling, and who keep enhancing their anthill with boxy buildings made of thousands of bricks, and then they tear them down just to build another one right away.

Gnutopians were totally different from Legomirians. They were ugly, black, stupid and dirty. They had no organizational structure and were godless. They lived in chaos, clutter and anarchy, and in their ignorance they called this state “freedom”, but of course they were not free as long as they had no laws that could draw a clear line between freedom and dependency. They did not know how to write and had no intention to learn it. They relied on spoken word, which they kept in greater honour than anything written on stone or paper. And their words were like chirping of birds and animal squawks. They believed themselves to be free. They were trespassing freely with little regard for borders and yards, free of clothes and etiquette, they had free love, without need for the approval of a priest or the bureaucracy of legal marriages, they were sleeping under starry sky and were wandering all day without caring for their thriving and shared equally everything they had. 

If they ever had a fight, the Gnutopians went to one of their judges who would sing them a song with the right words, a song he had learned from his ancestors. This is how the judge would tell them the law and then they would set at peace.

Sometimes the Gnutopians would call the others “Lemoists”, from the words lemma and emo, because they observed the Legomirians accept so many laws without understanding their meaning or utility, and also because many among them were afflicted by a disease of the soul that would make them shun away from people, be terrible unhappy and have an abnormal fascination for death and technology. When they were hearing about this, the Legomirians were getting very upset and would start calling them names, saying they look like wild goats and other demeaning appellations.

But the Legomirian arrogance got a strong blow one day right from one of their own. A linguist who was studying the emergence of the first written laws was astonished to find out that legis, their most beloved word which meant “law” and would give the name of their civilization, was directly rooted in the Gnutopian word logos, which means exactly “word” and was the name they would give to their law. The oldest writings unearthed from the ruins of the first legomirian city were telling how the dumbest of Gnutopians forgot how to proper say logos and distorted it to legis, and  he also forgot the song with the right words. Then he struggled all his life to remember the song with the right words, writing his attempts on stone and wood, paper and goat skin, and failing that, neither him nor his followers knew how it feels to be at peace with other people and the world.