the federal government needs to be scaled back to a size where he can personally stomp it to death with steel-toed boots. - Neal Stephenson

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.