What is the essence of all science fictions?
It turns out that everything we firmly believed in until now is a lie. Our world is falling to pieces around us. We have to make a choice. We either stay in the world what we know is a lie about, or we take a risk of facing chaos and unknown and escape cage. This is about Logan’s Run, Island and almost every sci-fi. Finding out truth, and escaping lie.
These works are similar to each other in Something else, the protagonists are usually a handsome man and a beautiful woman. You can hear from many people that this is just a sci-fi cliché. But it isn’t, it’s a life itself.
In other words, no one can claim to have a worldview until it has completely collapsed at least once in their lifetime. But people in general don’t change if they are not forced to change. They fall in love with their cage. It’s shocking to me, but so many people stand up for their own truth even when it becomes obvious to them beyond all doubt that it is an untenable lie.
Now I know it’s because they don’t dare to face the chaos and unknown. It is definitely a dreadful experience to see everything that we thought was solid and unshakable collapsing, but the alternative is yet worse. The world this based on collective lie, and the majority do every possible thing to maintain this lie, because the society can exist as long as we believe in it.
According to English philosopher, writer, Alan Watts the collective fear of nature leads to tyranny, to 1984. The nature is not trustworthy, indeed, but in reality it’s far more predictable than society in mass scale. The nature is the unknown and chaos itself. And very few can venture to face it voluntarily.
And such a person must confront not only the chaotic nature, but also his fellow human beings, the society, the government, the bureaucracy. Because everyone who stops lying endangeres the social stability, but there’s no other way of changing.
Even changing and keeping up with changes ain’t easy (actually it’s a most difficult task you can ever encounter) but bureaucracy is invented to make it more difficult if not impossible for you with artificially and arbitrary created obsticles. As nobler your goal as it challenges more the system, and as result the obstacles on your way as larger.
The entire social structure all around the world is designed not to change, and encourages everyone staying in comfort zone. If you look at the map of world, you don’t see countries but prison camps. Throughout your life, you are confined to an area the size of a handkerchief dedicated to you, and you need to request for a special permission to leave it temporary. The passport and visa system is not about freedom, but your slavery.
Wild animals have more freedom than you because their movements are not restricted. And this is not done to you by an alien race, but by your own fellow human beings, who cling to their cage for fearing nature. You are just different in one way from so called criminals, you have a bit larger cage. But you are a potential criminal in eyes of bureaucracy as long as taking fingerprint and bio-metric are required from you to travel.
No matter where you travel, you cannot leave your social position dedicated to you, even for a minute. Everything is on the standardizated slave identification connecting to the system. You can leave your cell for a brief time, but you can’t leave the system. It grabs you back everywhere from the world. Today only the seas remained as last shelter of unlimited freedom. We sacrificed both authenticity and meaning for efficiency. As you would be a mouse in a well designed pathway that allows you to head only on two directions but it does not let you design your own unique pathway.
In a world we live laws are not about protecting innocents against criminals and terrorists, but treating innocents as potential criminals and terrorists with countless over regulations. The whole structure is designed to regulate those who follow rules by default anyways. The problem is that any value system becomes unsustainable in these circumstances. You can’t even conclude what would be normal and natural, because normal and natural mean slightly different by any further draft law. There’s no any value system possible in such law system what permits initiation of violence against innocents.
The failure is your best teacher but only if you can own your failure. In system where you have a limited freedom, thus limited responsibility, you have no room to own your failure. If you can’t own your own failure is equal to meaningless stagnation.
What is the comfort zone?
To be extremely invincible is to declare that there is more to the world that we know than what we don’t. What’s more, what we don’t know yet isn’t worth knowing, because it’s probably stupid.
Whenever our knowledge is expanded with new knowledge and we gain new experiences, it necessarily overrides and makes the old obsolete. This is a risk. Just think about what a degree of narcissism, arrogance, vanity, egoism, or even cowardice to live life the way society expects us to, and how pathetic it is at the same time. Inside order, outside chaos. But protecting order without wanting to conquer the chaos never works. There is no rose without thorns, no love without pain, and no personal development without negative challenges.
Sure, we all operate this way to some degree. The brain creates its own comfort zone, from which it does not willingly move out. The problem is that the human brain is unable to improve in this totalitarian buble, because the brain is not designed to stagnate. But the brain itself doesn’t know what is the best for it for a long run. Hence that you are your own worst enemy is not an empty slogan. But the breaking point for all, when the reality begins to siege our cage. When everything we firmly believed in, loses credibility, we lose our identity.
Humility is courage, arrogance is cowardice, and to declare that we are not gods, therefore not infallible, is the greatest courage and humility at the same time. Inside order, outside chaos. The value system and ideology are common in this point. But this is where all their similarities end. The value system breaks out of its comfort zone, or more precisely, it continuously expands its borders, while ideologies are constantly on the defensive with reality, hence their comfort zone is constantly shrinking.
The current political systems and societies are therefore all discredited, corrupt and dead. After all, they are run by discredited, corrupt and dead people. However, this does not mean that people are not able to change at the individual level.
They want nothing more than to get you to give up on finding meaning in life, this is because if you seek meaning they lose control over you. The meaning became the most valuable resource, and the freedom is only the means to get it, and they promise you everything to give it up; pleasure, fun, power, consequence free life, even the stars from the sky, simple everything. And for the most it works indeed. But in return they can’t give anything valuable, only illusions, empty promises, and control on you. This is the modernism for, but if depriving man of chance to seek meaning is not a sin against holy ghost I can’t imagine what on earth would be that.
What happens when you change and improve? You notice that the people around you do not change and develop with you. You are eager to help open their eyes, but their attitude towards you becomes hostile. Their hypocrisy is exposed. Everyone around you is fake, or worse, they are liars all. They are all agents of the Matrix who maintain the fake reality. It turns out that everyone around you is an actor. When you enthusiastically share with your best childhood friend how you want to break out of your comfort zone, he immediately shoots your idea, because he doesn’t want you escaping, that would break the whole game.
The Truman Show can function only when Truman can’t escape the cage, or he doesn’t even see the cage. If he sees the cage the entire game collapses. The way the system keeps us deluded based on fear and paranoia, in Truman’s case this is the aquaphobia. The system conditions us fearing of unknown.
Just like Truman we are always bombarded with propaganda in every possible aspect of our lives, about how we should think, what is our identity, who are our enemies must be feared, who are our allyies and friends must be trusted. This repeats over and over again even in subconcious level, to keep us totally unaware of the delusions of modern ideology.
When more and more people start to refuse believing in the ridiculous postmodern society, the society goes down, what they want to avoid at all costs. When the people start to see the cage and comfront it, the cage itself ceases to exist. The economy and the state are about to collapse. However, the state will not collapse, although it would, but much worse will happen. In other words, the state is the last thing to collapse, because it always survives society, by sacrificing society. This means that people’s savings can be gone overnight. This is what is happening in China now, where the state is freezing people’s bank accounts. The state can only survive the crisis by sacrificing its own citizens, and the ruling elite will never hesitate to do so.
The best reality shows are ones where the characters don’t know they’re in it, and prison escape attempts are best prevented when the inmates don’t know they’re prisoners. But in the reality show called mass society, the actors and viewers are the same, as are the prisoners and the guards. But like all things, this too will come to an end. The lies are gonna be exposed. And when that happens, when the masses realize they have no choice, cracks appear in the fabric of society.
This is the breaking point for the people when they start rejecting the entire system. Even the most enthusiastic followers got enough with lies of hollwing society, seeing their savings float away. They no longer listen empty promises, and ridiculous ideological clichés, “we must stick together more than ever”. Our belief of society is falling apart. We more and more are about taking back control on our lives.
The lesson is that nature always gets back what belongs to it the exclusive monopoly of creation and regulation. And the whole process starts manifest itself in our nature. When it happens the game is over.
Thanks for reading me!
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