First proposed by the otherwise unremarkable Kolthari xenobiologist Eldregast Montequet, the Zenith Theory of Benign Civilizational Decline was an attempt to explain the readily-observable phenomenon of abrupt cultural collapse within a greater galactic context of relative prosperity. This model held that as a civilization approached a supposedly “ideal” state, in which resource scarcity was largely eliminated and most forms of suffering and discomfort easily treatable, the chance of entering irreversible decline became ever greater, as the drive for self-improvement which was the engine of all sentient progress become redundant and atrophied.

Ridiculed by most commentators, and denounced by parliamentary planning authorities as mere statistical sleight-of-hand, the theory nevertheless found a willing audience among the loose-knit group of radicals and discontents who would later form the Zeroist movement. Haladar Myrantik, a Vermalian expatriat, incorporated his own version of the theory into his foundational In Search of Nothing, which allegorically examined the fate of pre-utopian societies through the story of Nyn, a member of a pre-industrial civilization “for whom the fires still burned strong,” suddenly brought into the heart of galactic civilization, and the accolades he won in battle against “Kanath Zur—Devourer of the Lost Monopole.” Nyn’s final “I have destroyed too much; let us now build Nothing” monologue was commonly interpreted by Myrantik’s followers as a call for a pure, ideologically unencumbered revolutionary movement as an end itself. The modern Zeroist movement, with its calculatedly arbitrary goals and misdirectives, followed naturally.

—Heichner Kzolknov