The Kingdom That Forgot to Count

 

Once Upon a Time there was a Kingdom of Perfect Numbers.

Because every cautionary tale deserves a “once upon a time”.

It had graphs that never dipped, ministers who always agreed, and a dashboard that blinked green even when the ground beneath it cracked.

The kingdom ran like a grand equation: frictionless, flawless, free of errors or at least, free of those who pointed them out.

Their king believed deeply in order. Not organic order, the kind that emerges from complexity and contradiction, but a simplified order, like a spreadsheet scrubbed clean of decimals.

So he declared:

“Too many variables spoil the model.”
“Too much independence destabilizes unity.”
“Let us simplify.”

Simplify, of course, meant eliminate. Eliminate auditors. Eliminate data scientists. Eliminate the inconvenient commas in census tables and the squiggly doubts of dissenters.

Planning bodies were dissolved like unwanted terms in an equation. Think tanks were rebranded into echo chambers. Independent institutions were gently airbrushed into “alignment.” Even the weather bureau, poor thing, was advised to be more patriotic with its forecasts. Every number that dared displease was promptly removed from the equation. It was governance by subtraction.

Physics takes no orders

Now, physics is an unforgiving guest.

You can negotiate with journalists. You can “restructure” bureaucrats. But you can’t suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics by executive order.

Entropy, in its quiet way, began knocking. Entropy is the natural tendency of all systems to move from order to disorder. You can slow it down, tidy the place, polish the dashboard. But eventually, cracks appear. Pressure builds. And if you’ve disabled all the safety valves, you don’t get a gentle release. You get catastrophic collapse.

The old planners knew this. Systems need feedback. Equations need error terms. You can’t run a nation like a rigid equation with all the variables removed because then it’s not an equation. It’s propaganda with a pie chart.

The Golden Spiral and the Great Deletion

At first, it worked “visibly”. The budget curves curved flatteringly. Unemployment vanished, at least from the reports. Growth soared, especially in the brochures. And the kingdom began to resemble one of those spirals from nature, the kind you find in pinecones and sunflowers, in the unfurling of a fern, in the curve of a ram’s horn, in the shell of an ammonite fossil, even in the way galaxies spin and hurricanes whirl. A Fibonacci fantasy.

Except.

As any mathematician will tell you, Fibonacci’s sequence isn’t just beautiful; it’s recursive. Every number is built on what came before. Nothing skips. Nothing disappears. You can’t just delete the early terms and expect the spiral to keep spinning.

But that’s what the kingdom did. It ignored the roots and kept announcing golden ratios.

Meanwhile, physicists looked on nervously. Because what this king forgot along with ethics and humility is that in every closed system, entropy waits. The more you suppress feedback, the more disorder builds. And without opposition, pressure has nowhere to go but boom.

Institutions Are Load-Bearing Equations

Institutions, after all, are not ornaments. They are the load-bearing equations in the architecture of a democracy. You tamper with the constants; truth, transparency, checks and balances, and the whole model goes nonlinear.

Soon, the graphs began to twitch. Then shudder. The dashboard, once so obedient, began blinking red. And the king, now surrounded only by yes-men and sycophants who majored in public relations, had no idea what to do. After all, he’d removed everyone who did.

Because governance, like mathematics, needs variables. It needs doubt. It needs audit. It needs someone brave enough to say, “This number doesn’t make sense.” The kingdom, in its quest for perfection, had eliminated every error term and in doing so, removed the very possibility of correction.

By now, the king was surrounded by applause. Only applause. No feedback. No reality. Just echo. The kind of echo you get inside a collapsing cave.

Plato, in his well-lit Republic, warned us of this. When you exile the philosopher and elevate the actor, you don’t get a just city. You get theatre with uniforms. And Newton? Newton would’ve simply written “F = ma” in large font and pointed at the oncoming acceleration.

From Collapse to Count

The collapse wasn’t dramatic. It was... statistical.

First came the blackout of numbers. Then came the people noticing things not matching. Then the inevitable cascade: economic tremors, ecological backlash, a nationwide realization that “optimized” institutions meant no one was actually in charge of anything real.

And finally, most poetically was the rediscovery of the spiral. Not in a data dashboard, but in a farmer’s field. A sunflower bloomed, wild and uncounted, and someone whispered, “This spiral is true.”

Because nature does not lie. Mathematics cannot flatter. Physics will not bend—not even for a king.

Count. Or Collapse.

And as the silence broke and people began to talk again; not just clap, but really talk and someone found an old notebook once used by a retired statistician.

On the front, scribbled in a corner, were three words:

“Count. Or Collapse.”

They shared it in whispers and hashtags.
They chalked it on walls and etched it into constitutions.
They printed it on the first page of every schoolbook,
and folded it into the corners of everyday speech.

Because the kingdom had finally learned:

A system without feedback is not stability. It’s stagnation.

A graph that cannot fall is not truth. It’s theatre.

And a kingdom without error is a kingdom without correction.

The Final Turn of the Spiral

And so the kingdom, at last humbled by its own numbers, began again. Not with spectacle, but with stillness. Not with applause, but with accountability. Not with dashboards full of spin, but with data rooted in truth.

This time, they began with zero.
And then one.
And then one again.

Because the Fibonacci sequence always starts humbly: zero, one, one…and only then does the spiral unfold. Not in leaps, but in layers. Not by skipping steps, but by honouring each one.

Zero was not emptiness. It was origin. It was the quiet seed from which all patterns grow. And so, the spiral turned again; not as illusion, but as insight. Not for display, but for direction. And this time, it turned truly; slowly, honestly, beautifully.