Rant Against the Machine
There’s not much you, as a common citizen, can do in the face of masses that blindly succumbed to the Machine. You can just give Caesar what is his (or rather what he demands), and consider yourself lucky, if the system does not steamroll you in its ruthless, infinite pursuit of total ownership, always finding increasingly clever and elaborate ways to extract selfish profit from everything and everyone. Talk about misuse of human creativity.
Just consider — even Abrahamic tradition maintains that while charging interest is unlawful (yet various commentaries still go to great lengths to find loopholes when the practice might be acceptable — it’s almost always okay to fleece infidels and heathens), trade is generally considered kosher. However, and no matter how you slice it, trade is usury too.
After all, when you sell, you add your interest rate on top of the product’s actual value. Even if you are the producer and seller in one person. And particularly, if you consider that, by all standards and taken to logical conclusions, every resource for every product was always provided by nature for free. Which also includes your work.
It’s no wonder many people usually rave against the proverbial one percent of the mega rich — economy is the domain of the system we are all most palpably familiar with. But the key question always was, whom the armies obey, who’s the one who commands military and police.
Traditionally, ever since armed forces became en vogue roughly six millennia ago, it was always the king, nowadays, in some places, also euphemistically called president, prime minister, general secretary, and so on. But such individual is only a human too, susceptible to persuasion and influence, in many places also various, equally VIP-ish, checks and balances. That’s the reason why, historically, everyone wanted to have their fingers in the pot.
Even today, you will find high priests, top business people, and various kinds of scribal aides in cahoots with state officials and military power. You will also encounter regional subservient chieftains. Literal ones as you can see in the cases of Putin’s Kadyrov, or Khomeini’s lackeys from Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as their modern “democratic” incarnations in the form of union leaders, variety of “non-profit” or NGO CEOs, etc.
One big, happy family in continuous war for the top of imaginary pyramid. A bunch of people most vulnerable to, and most afflicted by, the fear of death which proportionally manifests as greed and subsequent ambition to rise through the ranks of the system. A system which appears meritocratic on its surface, but whose definition of merit (and associated reward for meritorious actions) is simply that which profits the system itself. A system that also happily accommodates anyone whose only merit is brute force.
For those who don’t crave power and wealth, the system offers bread and circuses. For consumption as well as a way to participate in order to provide value to society, to have merit and thus earn one’s right to live. At least, that’s how the system’s slogans go. The rewards in this case are then the dangling carrots of eventual fame and/or possible hedonism.
And for those who don’t aspire to any of that, the system promises relief after death, or recognition and validation, simply anything that would cure the affliction the system caused in the first place. In exchange for obedience to some dogma, system will promise anything you crave. Only for it to never arrive. Which is not a bug, but a feature.
Well, no amount of power, wealth, fame, consumption, validation, or hope will ever be enough to quench the fear of death. Nothing the Machine offers can give lasting satisfaction. It always needs more, lest the fear returns making greed sprout with ambitious desire burning again. Which is exactly the mechanism that makes it an insidious, vicious loop.
Make no mistake. When I talk about the Machine or the system, I always mean people. Quite naturally because the Machine cannot exists without a human. The system is a parasite, a sponger concept living rent-free in people’s heads with their full consent. A story maker that weaves tall tales.
Some people claim that they don’t fear death because they were promised eternal life after death. But that is a mistake, because it’s the hope of that promise that holds the fear at bay. Some folks maintain that a change of story would heal the world. But that is a mistake too, because it’s the vampiric leech itself that braids all myths, all promises, all social agreements. To be immune to it, drop all stories, drop all desires, drop all ambitions and hopes. Face naked your fear of death and know yourself.
You will die either way. You may as well die knowing for a fact that you are already immortal, one with Absolute, don’t leaving anywhere. That’s what’s called liberation. That’s what’s called Eden, Paradise, Kingdom of Heaven. That’s what’s called God. And you are that.
So, be free. To be. And let all those little, petty Caesars eat each other alive.
Enjoy the show.
