The Lost Men: An Allegory

In a world where the human population has been decimated self-reliance is the order of the day. Of necessity the few remaining people must adapt residual technology as far as possible with knowledge gleaned from books that were rescued and have been treasured for generations. After a childhood of such training each person is abandoned by their parents when they reach adulthood to pursue an essentially solitary existence. For most the only human contact is their counsel a mentor who guides them to find the one their life mate as decreed by Fate. Lack of society brings with it a lack of taboo ensuring that the Fate envisioned by a counsel is enacted unquestioningly. The only threats to this stable if sparse existence are the lost men mindless murderers who are also self-sufficient but with no regard for the well-being of others living outside the confines of counsel and Fate. Is Fate a real force or is it totally imagined an arbitrary convention a product of mankinds self-destructive tendency? Is it our responsibility to rebuke inherited wisdom for the sake of envisioning and manifesting our own will? In this allegory David Colon uses an alternate near-future to explore boundaries of the human condition and the extent to which we are prepared to surrender our capacity for self-determination in the face of apparently benevolent authoritarianism.