THE MACHINE
What is The Machine? It is a construct of our collective human consciousness. Even though It is a part of each of us, as we are of each other, The Machine is autonomous. One of the primary manifestations of The Machine we call The Free Market Economy. The Machine is the collective embodiment of our human greed and fear, our collective psychosis, and just as violent as psychotics can be! Think of it as a dissociative aspect of our collective human ego. The most important fact to know about The Machine is: It is an extrapolation of some natural biological mechanism providing for suicide of mutant, individual cells; a collective suicide Machine designed by our sociology from our biology and operating at a new, macro level via our human social system and our unique human consciousness, society, defined by technology and learning. The Machine has only one purpose and that is to destroy humanity. Right now The Machine has been building momentum for a long time and as it ravages us throughout the world as I write, The Machine has only one mind and one thing on Its mind and that is simply to destroy us all. Why? Because The Machine somehow – like the mutant individual cell – knows at a global level that we are basically an errant, dangerous mutation and must be stopped.
If It could, The Machine would simply pull the trigger on us all. Since It is disembodied, It cannot and so must take us out by an intelligent, seductive persuasion of our basest instincts. This mass suicide of our species may in Its throes wreck havoc upon much if not all of the earth, consistent with lack of consideration so often shown by suicides. In fact, this is already happening. Even if humans were magically beamed out by Scotty up on the Enterprise in-masse this very instant, the species extinction that we have produced by our exploitive and short sighted practices would continue on destroying this planet without us for decades into the future. I think this one fact alone if kept in mind when considering that in reality we are over 6 billion strong and growing exponentially on this earth with no Scotty in sight, should really help put things in perspective. Our perspective is just all fucked up. Part of what this means is that The Machine does not even need us because It rampages alone, destroying purely to destroy with no reason or menace or even awareness – on the one hand, It is the opposite of us, a mindless destroyer. On the other hand, It is the same as us, a mindless destroyer. I am tempted to assert morality into this and say that we should never have let evil get out of control like this. I doubt that is really very helpful. We will fail because we as a species failed to fit into our place here on this planet. Our destiny was to become the protective and guiding Over mind of the planet but instead we chose to because frightened, blusterous exploiters of the world that we are – we failed, made a big mistake, blew it.
Here is another very important aspect of The Machine. It is not human. It is not subject to human feelings, certainly not to dreams and hopes. So It is not subject to what we would consider normal, human appeals – say, such as we may dare to request even of a despotic human leader. It has no relationship to us – when we cut ourselves off from nature, The Machine cut Itself off from us. That is when it was born. That is how ancient a monster this Machine really is. And it is a monster such that we can say full and well that “we have created a monster”. With technology, agriculture, language we hunter gather bands of humans really exploded – populations exploding overnight and dependant upon local resources for survival forming enormous “hive” like city state structures with suddenly 10,000 closely cohabitating individuals working collectively on a multitude of highly coordinated tasks, with divisions of labor and a hierarchical social structure of familial fascist control. Failure of this kind of city state “tribe” involved not just a few dozen lives but many thousands of lives.
Yes, the Machine is Fascist. Everywhere you find The Machine, you find fascism. The Shakespearean tragedy of our human natures, our greatest weakness as a species, is the deal we made to facilitate that explosion caused by technology. The dirty little secret of how we humans act in the big city; a biologically rooted system of fascist social control. We human animals are designed to act for the good of all, or the dearth of all. So is a bee. What we have is our big old frontal lobe to add into the equation, really mixing things up! We were destined to be fascists. That innate desire to maintain the status quo exactly relative to how precious the status quo is to us as individuals, is part of our bee-like social system allowing us to function in such numbers and with such complexity. The idea that there is a self regulating system in our species for inducing individuals to undertake behavior good for the group is key. Our social structure – including language and even technology – comes from our biology, not the other way around. How do you suddenly shift the behavioral system of a species in such a way that small tribes of 50 to no more than 150 individuals of hunter gathers can function socially within agrarian city states numbering in the tens of thousands of individuals. The question is mind boggling and seems impossible when looked at in this manner. Fascism seems to be mechanism we humans employ to accomplish this momentous feat. I would suggest that our familial tribal structure and our hierarchical status seeking behavior as well as this inclination to self regulating status quo maintenance are the major underlying reasons behind the fact that fascism flowered with our numbers.
So most of us being Followers are going to tend to “go with the flow”, as it were. What that “flow” means is defined by the relative minority of dominant members in our society. How “they” become dominant is flexible – like the many different types of languages but what is not flexible is our unique, animal social structure, corresponding to human grammar, which is hard wired. Who becomes dominant does seem to often involve familial connections – even in the 21st century we speak here in America of the “Bush Dynasty”, and it is hardly a joke, reflecting a much deeper reality than we generally acknowledge. What I am saying is that The Machine was created from all that is human but that It has transcended all that is human. The Machine has taken the helm of this Ship of Fools from what would be our natural Alpha leadership and It careens out of control. I do not think now that any level of cooperative effort could stop this Machine because it has crossed some unthinkable threshold and exists now beyond the confides of our humanity and possibly even this mighty planet. No leader will arise to challenge The Machine. No Nation State or alliance of Nation States will arise to challenge The Machine. No corporate entity whatsoever could possible challenge this Machine.
It is our innate tendency toward fascism that is perhaps the unfortunate key to it all. Those unethical studies from the fifties that appalled us all by showing how cruel we could be given fairly innocuous circumstances, such as a man in white coat insisting that we “shock someone”. Maybe we drew the wrong lesson from that. We definitely drew back from it in horror of ourselves, evidently some aspect of our humanity preferring to think of us as more democratic and compassionate than perhaps we really are? The reason that we reacted the way that we did is that we are fascist literally down to the bone. Of course we shocked innocent people simply because an authority figure told us to do it. This is how exactly we got here today. If we had said, “no, absolutely not!” when the man in the white coat told us to shock another innocent human, those early city states would have either never formed in the first place or collapsed in chaos. Our social system in this regard is exactly like a conduit for energy, in this case a conduit between we humans and our new found technology. Without this fascist social system, our whole 10,000 years of civilization would have simply fizzled. Who the authority figure is, is flexible; that there is an authority figure is not flexible but a key aspect of our animal social structure. What is also key is our hard wired social obedience to our collectively chosen status quo. It is just our nature to listen to the man in the white coat, whoever that man may be!
Like Boy Dylan said: The Masters make the rules for the wise men and fools.
What is The Machine? It is a construct of our collective human consciousness. Even though It is a part of each of us, as we are of each other, The Machine is autonomous. One of the primary manifestations of The Machine we call The Free Market Economy. The Machine is the collective embodiment of our human greed and fear, our collective psychosis, and just as violent as psychotics can be! Think of it as a dissociative aspect of our collective human ego. The most important fact to know about The Machine is: It is an extrapolation of some natural biological mechanism providing for suicide of mutant, individual cells; a collective suicide Machine designed by our sociology from our biology and operating at a new, macro level via our human social system and our unique human consciousness, society, defined by technology and learning. The Machine has only one purpose and that is to destroy humanity. Right now The Machine has been building momentum for a long time and as it ravages us throughout the world as I write, The Machine has only one mind and one thing on Its mind and that is simply to destroy us all. Why? Because The Machine somehow – like the mutant individual cell – knows at a global level that we are basically an errant, dangerous mutation and must be stopped.
If It could, The Machine would simply pull the trigger on us all. Since It is disembodied, It cannot and so must take us out by an intelligent, seductive persuasion of our basest instincts. This mass suicide of our species may in Its throes wreck havoc upon much if not all of the earth, consistent with lack of consideration so often shown by suicides. In fact, this is already happening. Even if humans were magically beamed out by Scotty up on the Enterprise in-masse this very instant, the species extinction that we have produced by our exploitive and short sighted practices would continue on destroying this planet without us for decades into the future. I think this one fact alone if kept in mind when considering that in reality we are over 6 billion strong and growing exponentially on this earth with no Scotty in sight, should really help put things in perspective. Our perspective is just all fucked up. Part of what this means is that The Machine does not even need us because It rampages alone, destroying purely to destroy with no reason or menace or even awareness – on the one hand, It is the opposite of us, a mindless destroyer. On the other hand, It is the same as us, a mindless destroyer. I am tempted to assert morality into this and say that we should never have let evil get out of control like this. I doubt that is really very helpful. We will fail because we as a species failed to fit into our place here on this planet. Our destiny was to become the protective and guiding Over mind of the planet but instead we chose to because frightened, blusterous exploiters of the world that we are – we failed, made a big mistake, blew it.
Here is another very important aspect of The Machine. It is not human. It is not subject to human feelings, certainly not to dreams and hopes. So It is not subject to what we would consider normal, human appeals – say, such as we may dare to request even of a despotic human leader. It has no relationship to us – when we cut ourselves off from nature, The Machine cut Itself off from us. That is when it was born. That is how ancient a monster this Machine really is. And it is a monster such that we can say full and well that “we have created a monster”. With technology, agriculture, language we hunter gather bands of humans really exploded – populations exploding overnight and dependant upon local resources for survival forming enormous “hive” like city state structures with suddenly 10,000 closely cohabitating individuals working collectively on a multitude of highly coordinated tasks, with divisions of labor and a hierarchical social structure of familial fascist control. Failure of this kind of city state “tribe” involved not just a few dozen lives but many thousands of lives.
Yes, the Machine is Fascist. Everywhere you find The Machine, you find fascism. The Shakespearean tragedy of our human natures, our greatest weakness as a species, is the deal we made to facilitate that explosion caused by technology. The dirty little secret of how we humans act in the big city; a biologically rooted system of fascist social control. We human animals are designed to act for the good of all, or the dearth of all. So is a bee. What we have is our big old frontal lobe to add into the equation, really mixing things up! We were destined to be fascists. That innate desire to maintain the status quo exactly relative to how precious the status quo is to us as individuals, is part of our bee-like social system allowing us to function in such numbers and with such complexity. The idea that there is a self regulating system in our species for inducing individuals to undertake behavior good for the group is key. Our social structure – including language and even technology – comes from our biology, not the other way around. How do you suddenly shift the behavioral system of a species in such a way that small tribes of 50 to no more than 150 individuals of hunter gathers can function socially within agrarian city states numbering in the tens of thousands of individuals. The question is mind boggling and seems impossible when looked at in this manner. Fascism seems to be mechanism we humans employ to accomplish this momentous feat. I would suggest that our familial tribal structure and our hierarchical status seeking behavior as well as this inclination to self regulating status quo maintenance are the major underlying reasons behind the fact that fascism flowered with our numbers.
So most of us being Followers are going to tend to “go with the flow”, as it were. What that “flow” means is defined by the relative minority of dominant members in our society. How “they” become dominant is flexible – like the many different types of languages but what is not flexible is our unique, animal social structure, corresponding to human grammar, which is hard wired. Who becomes dominant does seem to often involve familial connections – even in the 21st century we speak here in America of the “Bush Dynasty”, and it is hardly a joke, reflecting a much deeper reality than we generally acknowledge. What I am saying is that The Machine was created from all that is human but that It has transcended all that is human. The Machine has taken the helm of this Ship of Fools from what would be our natural Alpha leadership and It careens out of control. I do not think now that any level of cooperative effort could stop this Machine because it has crossed some unthinkable threshold and exists now beyond the confides of our humanity and possibly even this mighty planet. No leader will arise to challenge The Machine. No Nation State or alliance of Nation States will arise to challenge The Machine. No corporate entity whatsoever could possible challenge this Machine.
It is our innate tendency toward fascism that is perhaps the unfortunate key to it all. Those unethical studies from the fifties that appalled us all by showing how cruel we could be given fairly innocuous circumstances, such as a man in white coat insisting that we “shock someone”. Maybe we drew the wrong lesson from that. We definitely drew back from it in horror of ourselves, evidently some aspect of our humanity preferring to think of us as more democratic and compassionate than perhaps we really are? The reason that we reacted the way that we did is that we are fascist literally down to the bone. Of course we shocked innocent people simply because an authority figure told us to do it. This is how exactly we got here today. If we had said, “no, absolutely not!” when the man in the white coat told us to shock another innocent human, those early city states would have either never formed in the first place or collapsed in chaos. Our social system in this regard is exactly like a conduit for energy, in this case a conduit between we humans and our new found technology. Without this fascist social system, our whole 10,000 years of civilization would have simply fizzled. Who the authority figure is, is flexible; that there is an authority figure is not flexible but a key aspect of our animal social structure. What is also key is our hard wired social obedience to our collectively chosen status quo. It is just our nature to listen to the man in the white coat, whoever that man may be!
Like Boy Dylan said: The Masters make the rules for the wise men and fools.
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New Mexico
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