Breaking Free--The Age of Disposible People

The labyrinthine structure begins to whir with godless clamor--cogs clank and pistons hiss; long-toothed gears mesh together and twirl.

Steam hisses from the gordian tangles of its countless twined pipes, and rows of open-mouthed furnaces bellow forth the fiery breath of the damned. From wide-brimmed smokestacks comes a soupy gray fog, a thick morass that expands across the heavens to efface billowing clouds and crystalline skies.

With deliberate ignorance the machine looks past those untoward changes it wrecks upon the land. With spiteful malice it considers them to be collateral damage--acceptable losses--for in truth, it cares only for itself, and acts only in its own interests. So with childlike glee it turns a blind eye to the pain and suffering it causes, and continues its unchecked spread across this world.

Already taller than the greatest mountain, broader than the widest sea, it aims to grow larger still. It wants only to replicate and expand to new and obscene dimensions, metastasizing across the land as a oily black tumor. For just as a shark swims through the oceans, unable to stop moving without suffering swift and irrevocable death, the machine must continue expanding to survive.

Mindlessly, voraciously, it needs to keep ingesting all in its path, gluttonously devouring all it encounters. So as the great beast awakens from slumber and lurches into action, immediately it acts to please itself. That immense golem rises with insatiable hunger then clamors for sharp relief, so with octopi tentacles it gropes out across the land and holds fierce to all that it touches.

Its game is a mindless one--growth alone, the pursuit of sustaining itself at any cost. And the cost has been great. Already it's claimed the water and air, the earth and the forests. Already it has all the creatures of land and sea, along with the precious ores and minerals buried in hillsides and caverns.

It takes all that glorious beauty of nature and reshapes things at its whim--carving them away and whittling them down, hammering things flat and molding them square. Distilling all away from their natural states of innate perfection, it forces them into deformed and ugly shapes that serve nothing but its own twisted designs.

Reshaping them in its own faceless image, it sustains itself as the cost of those it imbibes. Transforming all that it touches it destroys all that it consumes. Over the centuries it accumulated all it could ever need. But still it demands more.

Now, it wants you.

Make no mistake, the machine already has its oily tentacles slathered across your arms and legs, sunk deep into your heart and soul and mind. It's already working so desperately to lure you inside, where you'll be cut and molded, pressed and reshaped, distilled down until you're just another well-oiled and identically crafted cog in its cannibalistic game.

It won't seize hold of you like it does the earth and the forests. It won't tear you kicking and screaming from the ground. No, no, no--its ways are far more subtle and refined. For in order to survive, in order to keep functioning, it needs your willing cooperation. So for you it lays traps more ingenious, and speaks in languages more sublime. It snares you with your own desires and coerces you with your wants. It tempts you with empty promises, and buys your soul with a paradox both irreconcilable and absurd.

It promises you an utter impossibility--the notion of spiritual fulfillment from the acquisition of material things.

The very idea is idiotic, ridiculous, laughably insane. On its face it presents in illogicality that should jar the mind like a slap to the face. Yet it works. Again and again it's worked. Throughout the centuries the machine has snared billions and untold billions with that same snake-oil pitch.

And if you don't see through it, you'll be the next poor soul to buy in to its Ponzi scheme. You'll believe the sweet nothings of its beautiful lie, and die waiting for the fulfillment of a paradoxical reality that will never manifest.

Then for your mistake you'll suffer. Once you step inside, the machine that promised so much will never deliver anything it promised. From you it will only take and take and take. It will use you until you have nothing left to give, squeeze out every drop of blood until you're dry. Then, when you're spent and broken, weary and decayed, it'll simply toss you aside and replace you with another.

This is the age we're living in--the age of disposable people, a homogenized paradigm where the machine will continue doing its best to carve and whittle away your glorious imperfections to fulfill its own needs. After all, if all parts are identically formed--each perfectly assimilated and crafted in accordance to uniform plan and alignment--the machine will never have trouble finding replacement parts.

At the cost of your existence the machine will perpetuate itself. Your death is its immortality, and your uniqueness is nothing more than the rough edge it needs smooth away. It wants nothing but interchangeable clockwork gears to continue operating within its heart, willing slaves mindlessly perform their individual roles in fulfillment of its dark ambitions.

The education system, the social nuances, the entertainment industry, the mainstream propaganda--all are designed to cut and mold and reshape our minds, slicing us apart and sewing us up, pulling out our innards and stuffing our heads full of the same empty fluff so we act the same, talk the same, think the same... so eventually, if it continues long enough, we'll be the same.

It's simple to control billions of robots that have the identical cultural programming. It's easy to abuse and exploit mindless dregs who've been stripped of logic, taught to bow down and conditioned to never ask questions. The machine wants you to sit back and let it do your thinking. It wants you to relax, slack-jawed and limp, and watch the pretty people on television. It laughs while you argue and debate endlessly over which freak of nature is best at throwing the ball into the hoop or net, while you leave questions of morality and politics for it to answer.

Complacency is what it worships. The status quo ascends to the divine. It wants you to do nothing while it continues metastasizing, consuming the earth out from under you.

But no longer can this continue. The time has come for a change.

Instead of letting it lure you inside and lull you to sleep, it's time to wake up to its empty promises It's time to opt-opt.

Instead of following that gentle suction into the heart of the best, it's time to cut ourselves away and be free.

The first step is realizing that you are not a human resource. You are not just another cog meant to labor in this machine. You are not a disposable person, and you CANNOT be replaced.

Never forget that. And never let the machine lure you inside. Just walk away as the smokestacks gasp and drown. Turn your back as the bellowing stoves sputter and die.

Then laugh uproariously as the pipes crumble into rust and this cancerous machine breaths its last.

It's time to take back our power and sever the ties that bind. It's time to remember what we truly are.

We are each human beings. We are each special, remarkable, and utterly unique.

(Yes, even you.)

a reply to: JonButtonIII

My first attempt to reply didn't seem to make it just a glitch or a mod at work?

I was lucky in skipping to the end where I found your statement that we are special because we are humans.

Could you clarify why that should be so as spoken by a very biased human? It is not for the sake of an argument, but because I don't see it way. To explain my position with less prose, I will say that humans are a life form on this planet and perhaps the more active intelligence on it. But as in the old days of the Earth being the center of the Universe, many of us these days feel quite differently. Some of us actually take as a simple truth that life abounds in the Universe and we are probably--if you give any credibility to UFO reports and the discovery of "earth-like" planets these days--not only not alone, but are an upstart Third World world if even that high in the order.

Basically, what I'm getting at is that we are top dog (so we think) on Earth, a continuation of the anthropocentric argument. But given the prospect that other intelligences are visiting us and may even have a hand in our being here, are we really that special to any of them out there anywhere except for our self opinion? Are we so sacred that if it were deemed that the existence of the Earth itself, as a living body, was more important in the long run over then the existence of the crazy creatures that are ravaging it? What would be the choice of a higher intellect? It may help if you were to view the situation from a quasi-religious viewpoint as if there was a God up there on a throne tempted to start the process over or not. I know, it had to be objective when you are human, but it is worth a try.