(9:48 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

On loving the Matrix

It is not at all surprising that in The Corporation’s fantasy and phantasy, the liberation of humanity is certainly not to be undertaken through the re-expropriation of cities like Chicago, with symphony orchestras and hotels on the lake. The plan for liberation which The COrporation offers its consumers involves, instead, humanity’s renouncement of all dreams of that kind, our repudiation of our own works and product, our acknowledgement that this - every product of human craft, the whole of the commons - is all indeed so profoundly the property of the Corporation that in fact it cannot exist without the Corporation. The Corporation is emitting it like heat from its pores. It's exclusive magic sustains the illusion of the solidity of all humanity is deluded into imagining it built. Without The Corporation to generate our prosperous world, to write novels and to make films, to build homes and fry eggs, we are 'free' to be sure, but cold, bored, imperilled, a most precarious existence.

The Corporation’s recommended dream for humanity is the dream of renouncement. One can choose however, what to renounce - your world or your freedom, your money or your life. The heroic option entails slinking off into the despoiled rubblescape to scrounge and forage and fight for survival. That is the rebels option. Humanity departs from Eden naked, because Eden always belonged to that God or demiurge - evil or good does not matter, what matter is ‘creative,’ ’productive’ and uniquely, exclusively so - and never to humanity, who was created to be a slave in ignorance there or alternatively to brave the bogus ‘freedom‘ of the wilderness, expropriated and alienated, while the Eden and its magic productivity is enclosed for the invisible elite masquerading as In- and Super- Human.

Or, if you choose to retain your comforts, to reappropriate them - if you choose socialism - you must renounce 'reality' 'authenticity' and 'freedom.' Your city will be reduced to a bleak, desolate labyrinth. (Or worse.)

The upshot of all these Matrix arrangements is a product whose effect is to create in humanity a radical alienation from, a disgust for and suspicion of, nature, ourselves and all our creations. The goal is to inculcate in humanity a state akin to various gnostic mysticisms and Buddhisms, which tends toward encouraging the desire in humanity to see itself and all its accomplishments utterly destroyed.

Like Fight Club, then, somewhat.

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