Political Medicine and Conspiracy Theories — Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver enters the school of political projectors at the Grand Academy and finds the professors melancholy, making: they propose wild chimeras like choosing ministers for merit, rewarding virtue, and aligning princes with the public good. That confirms his old observation that no idea is too extravagant for a philosopher to call truth. Not all are visionaries. One doctor treats government like medicine and would have senators' pulses felt for three days, then dosed with lenitives and corrosives before they sit. The remedies grow violent and surgical. Ministers who forget business should be slapped, kicked, or pinched on schedule; every senator should vote directly opposite to the argument he just made; warring parties should have their occiputs sawed and brains swapped so half a skull debates itself into moderation. Professors quarrel over taxing beauty, wit, and courage while exempting wisdom and justice because nobody would pay. Another author advises statesmen to study suspects at stool, judging treason from the colour, odour, taste, and consistence of excrements; green ordure means regicide on his own experiments. Gulliver politely offers additions about Tribnia, where discoverers, informers, and decipherers paid by ministers manufacture plots: a close stool means privy council, a flock of geese a senate, and when symbols fail, acrostics turn innocent letters into conspiracy. The professor welcomes the material for his treatise. Gulliver has seen enough of this country and begins to think of returning home to England.