Against The Carnival

“The dimness of our intellectual eyes Aristotle fitly compares to those of an owl at noonday.” – Robert Boyle

The Media Machine is the substance of our new religion, and it’s difficult to pin down just how much it permeates into every aspect of our lives. Every medium of telecommunications is inevitably corrupted by the Machine; it is greedy, it is devouring of every fold of our lives. The corners are ablaze with the fires of the Machine as it seeks out every hidden, private word and thought. The Thought Police began their tenure thousands of years ago, and it is only a matter of time before technology gives them the power to truly police the innermost wrinkles of our minds.

Yet the corruption comes from the Hierarchy and not from the technology itself. Human innovation has brought our generation to a place in time in which distance is virtually erased with regards to communication. I have a slew of brothers and sisters scattered across nearly every continent in the world and all we have to do in order to engage in real-time communication (phone, skype, chat) is line up our schedules with a knowledge of time-differences.

Is it not amazing that floating chunks of metal around our planet enable this to happen? That is the creation and the power of the human mind. Cooperation between individuals can help move our society to further and more amazing heights than ever before. Though it is often the genius of a few individuals that can spur such a society-wide change (Gates, Galileo, Plato, etc), it is the hard work of the disseminators that bring the change to the doorstep of each of our homes.

Because the corruption is not intrinsically a part of advancement (a view that many conservatives seem to so gladly espouse), that means that simply the act of participating in these places of our culture is not necessarily an act of aid to the Machine. In fact, as many already know, there are parallel cultures running sideways to this massive and overwhelming Media Machine that decry its sins and call it by its true name of oppression.

“Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower, / The moping owl does to the moon complain.” – Thomas Gray

We each choose the manner in which we interact with not only other individuals but with institutions. Twitter, tumblr and facebook, google+ and bing; all of these things are not mandatory but are in fact choices that we make, overtly, to engage with on a regular basis (except Bing; does anyone under 40 really use that?). Of course, there are a thousand layers of coercion, vertical and lateral and probably diagonal as well, but for now, I make a choose as to how I engage in the Internet, or whether to plug in at all.

I choose to use these platforms as my soapbox, as my herald’s trumpet. I hope to find a network and a community of like-minded voices of those brave enough to cry out against the Machine. Like the owl, we can complain for words ARE an action, however small, that will build and build our own tower, twig by twig.

That is how I choose to use the internet and the associate realm for myself, and for others.

References and allusions to the Matrix are cheap and easy for me and those in my position, as are any strings drawn to Lewis Caroll’s world of Alice. The concept of being awake and earnest in a new world that shows its horrific insanity to those who can think and see is one that I believe we can all resonate with. Yet even these poignant analogies fall short, or perhaps are indicative themselves of our dependence on such allusions.

The power of a metaphor is undeniable. Great writers, powerful speakers, and influential people from all walks of life make wide and varied use of metaphor. Emerson drew his inspiration from Nature, and Goldman from her life experiences. Yet when we look at so much of our own lives, where do we take our metaphors from? If we look inward in an honest manner, how often do our own references draw from the Media Machine, the Carnival of lights and sounds that disgorge from every television, every radio, every webpage?

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” – Karl Marx,1844

As I reflect on my own life and my own journey through the Carnival, I cannot help but think back to this very well known quote by Karl Marx. Often slung around by anti-religious evangelists and burnt-out former Catholics or Christians, the true impact of this is often forgotten, it seems, because of a simple misunderstanding of both context and definition of a religion. The first lines of the preceding paragraph read as follows:

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.”

When we look further at this, I believe that we can widen the use of the word religion to more than just a house of gods worship or a set of rites from ancient days. It goes far beyond the world of Christianity, Buddhism or Islam, past Hinduism or Catholicism. Religion is the product of man, and according to Marx, the ‘self-consciousness and self-esteem of man’. So how far can we extend this perspective on religion?

When looking around the Carnival that we live in, I see a great deal of Religion but never more than when I, like so many others, consume Media. The Media Machine has become the almighty Religion, the not-quite-deified creation of Man that feeds our ego and our debilitating self-love. It is so often a form of self-serving intellectual masturbation as we sit and surf channels that never question our perceptions, that push us to never question our ground or our principles.

So little of what we do ever incites doubt because doubt terrifies man; it makes him wonder whether his house his built on stone or sand. But whereas the first questions are only the beginning of a long journey to understanding the Carnival for what it is, few even question enough to see the Carnival for the damaging entity that it is, let alone go far enough to see why the Carnival is what it is.

The Media Machine is the Religion for every religious doctrine. The Media Machine is the opiate of the people, of every people for every day. Controlled by money-obsessed filth, the true extent of the damage caused by our Media Machine is almost overwhelming.

And so on May Day, for those of us who are new or unsure, who question but still lack the most apposite or poignant vocabulary for this journey, I call for one small action. Consider the role of Media in your life as a drug, as a substance fed to you by the Filth that run OUR world, a substance meant to dull and tranquilize you while they steal and lie and violate the human rights of millions and billions of our brethren.

Consider, for a few moments, how dangerous this drug is. Consider your slow conversion to the Media Machine and what you can do to wean yourself off of this deadly cocktail of lies and distraction. The suffocating power of such a monolithic entity is nearly incomprehensible. Yet, it is not hopeless, for the hope of the human soul and the power within each of us is enough to take back our own.

That is the power of the human spirit, the potential of man and woman. It begins with a only few questions: let us ask them to ourselves beginning today.

Hello, and welcome.

Today marks not the beginning of a journey but only the inevitable recognition of its impact on the essential personhood of who I am today. It is special not because I suddenly find myself woken from the Matrix, but for a much simpler reason- because I finally find myself ready to articulate the roads I've walked, the landscapes of humanity that I've seen and the utter betrayal of mankind that the very spine of our society is carved from.

I mean for this space to act as both weapon and whetstone, as both the forge and the iron that brightly burns into the night as it is shaped even in darkness. A simple format is often the most effective, and I hope that my partner and I can begin to share and sharpen one another as an act of communal revolution against the machine, against the Carnival of modern society. Though we come from different roads and may very well arrive at very different destinations, for now we break our bread together and hope to use our shared ardor as a means to inspire not only each other, but humanity at large.

Like a lighthouse in a storm, we shine and make brilliant the words of anarchy and anti-authoritarianism proudly. I believe that we are all candles with veins of wax, with nerves of wicker, and that by diving deep into the primordial embers of common human dignity that we are all set aflame with the passion of calculated will that is so lacking in the matte, indolent eyes of the sheepled-masses. Though some burn short and some burn long, we choose with purpose and intention to cauterize the input-output complex installed by the machine and become more than an automaton- we choose to be burn brightly, to learn, and to change.

It begins in small steps, and so here and now I place another step forward to my future with eyes alight. We crawl then walk and run, but someday I hope we will soar the skies on wings of respect and love for all humanity.

Today marks not the beginning of a journey but instead the beginning of our place in its record. I hope to share revelations and worries, histories and suppositions, victories and failures; most of all, I hope to share- forever and always- truth, honesty, and love.

Walk with me, with us, and with those who came before.

The odyssey continues; the Carnival awaits.

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