Trapped In The Slaughterhouse
Listen to a reading of this article:
Western civilization is a story of full bellies and starving hearts. Of a feast of information and a famine of truth. Of conveyor belts churning out processed food, conformity-enforcing media and power-serving culture. Enough food to stay alive but not enough sustenance to live.
They keep us alive but they don't let us live. They give us enough carbohydrate to turn the gears of industry, but they keep us too busy, poor, propagandized, confused and crazy to actually drink from the waters of life. To actually experience the beauty of this world. To let the crackling potentiality of advanced terrestrial life blossom to fruition within us.
The modern empire rules us by filling our markets with Wonder Bread and our schools and media with lies. By filling our bellies and starving our souls. By churning out mountains of useless landfill without ever producing anything of real value. By making more while providing less.
They improve food production and medicine just enough to lengthen our lifespans, only so that they have more life to drain us of. They let us populate the earth with more humans only to drain us of our humanity.
We're not people to them. We are batteries. We are fuel.
This is no civilization. It's a slaughterhouse. A fake plastic performance staged to funnel human life into the gears of an insatiable machine. A fake plastic culture designed to keep us on the conveyor belt so that our life force can be converted into fuel for a soulless empire. A fake plastic society built to keep us marching into the food processor.
There are so very many more of us than there are of them. We could crush them like an insect the moment we decided to. But the brainwashing is so very, very effective, and the matrix hallucination seems so very, very real. Our propaganda-induced coma keeps us fueling the machine.
Not until we awaken ourselves from the coma will our adventure on this planet really begin. Not until we can unplug our minds from the empire's life-siphoning control mechanisms we can begin to really live.
We'll either wake each other up, or we'll remain trapped in the slaughterhouse.
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I'm wondering what will change when our bellies match our hearts in starving. Maybe that will wake us up?
I feel the same.
My only hedge is in limiting this to 'Western' civilization. Living 40 years in Japan now, it is the same ... as I suspect with China, Korea, India, and so on. This may be a consequence, unintended or not, of any populations of scale larger than communities of Dunbar's number or less. There are limits to empathy driven behavior, and the rule-driven behavior that necessarily comes with scale is one of them.
Other limits might be hinted at in the 'Trolley Car' problem, or in the conformity-authority behaviorist experiments of Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo.
I am not optimistic for those of us not among the privileged few, those within the steep walls of those Bill 'Gated' communities.