Geraghty’s Pub’s social drinkers have been on a year-long, serious mission to create a solution for World Peace. After a much-fraught and humorous set of deliberations, they have chosen music as the solution, it being the ultimate creator of universal empathy.

But the contemporary world is moving in the opposite direction. Political polarization and societal divisions are increasing in democracies, and some autocracies are contemplating conquests.

It seems that Orwell was only 38 years ahead of his time...

ixing in their well-known drollness, the social drinkers bemoan societies’ complacency amid the increasing whiff of techno-totalitarianism. They describe underlying factors that are driving a gradual but inexorable movement toward dystopia in democracies through the weaponization of digitization, disinformation, and due process.

They worry that as the principles of democratic nations are undermined, the collapse of the current geopolitical order could follow.

Their concerns are unexpectedly confirmed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Surprising romantic interludes intersperse the seriousness as a scenario gradually emerges for a new world order that challenges their confidence in music as the solution to World Peace...