Alone In The Machine

Sailing To Byzantium

Inevitably i get burned. Is there such a thing as culture? All i see are individuals struggling to survive, conforming to other individuals so that they wont be socially ostracized.

Being social creatures their lives are built around the group, their survival is built around it. So much so that they will conform to any mass delusion or general consensus of belief.

They want you to move in isolation, to find unity through some exclusive belief. They want you to be one of them. To identify yourself with some fragment, to pitch your territory and say 'this is me'. Once you do that they have you, they limit you. You will fight for what 'ism' you think you are and forget the wider truth that we are all just human beings. We will forget the fact that we are all consciousness having an experience and that we are all essentially the same,  and instead break off into warring factions.

The thought had been dawning on me for some time that virtually all groups need an enemy. The religious conflicts, the political conflicts. The governments of all nations justify themselves as necessary by making an enemy of their own citizens, or by seeing other nations and governments as potential threats.

Think of all the nuclear weapons they have all acquired in the name of security! It would almost be funny if there had not been enough of them to destroy the entire world many times over. Those men in suits, those bureaucrats! If the bombs were ever to go off we'd know we shouldn't have left them in charge, only then it would be too late. Total planetary extinction, all in the name of security.

We'd know it would have been better to live wild and free with no governments, with no leaders. Better for humanity at large, better for the biosphere and for the planet. Yet we are so deeply conditioned to having leaders, and we would rather have the veneer of security than freedom.

Freedom can be insecure, things can go wrong, but it is also a state of nature with a purity to it. When all people are truly free, when power is not exclusively in the hands of the few, then there can rarely be the possibility of a global disaster.

This is not culture, this is power and fear. Only the individuals that accept the possibility of social banishment can ever create anything new that might be absorbed into the general knowledge. Haven't you noticed that it is only those few rare individuals that contribute and leave behind what William Butler Yeats would call 'monuments of unageing intellect'? It is only those odd few that rise us above it all and drag us out of the nightmare of history.

Rather than riches, rather than flesh and blood, give me this! To contribute and create something that will out live my own life. To give birth not to a suffering human being that will have to struggle and make its way through life, but instead to give birth to children of the mind. To leave behind artifacts of the mind that cannot suffer, that do not feel hunger and thirst, and which can only console and please.