Welcome to the desert of the real

Call it Compromateria, the Construct or the Matrix, it can in any case be argued that The Matrix has you. As the world that has been drawn over your eyes to blind you from the real, the Matrix is the totality, maybe even the totalitarianism of modern day civilized life.

An ever increasing degree of substitution, or representation, makes up the world we now live in. The safety of the Tribe, living close together and protecting each other from natural peril, has been replaced by the city walls. And thus you put your trust in society, and in the priests and emperors of the walled community. Within civilization, your direct exchanges with Nature to make a living have been replaced by trade and money and debt and taxes. All the Plants and Animals and Landscapes you once saw every day around you, have been substituted by symbols; words and numbers. The River is now an amount of cubic meters of H2O, or kWh, belonging to the emperor and to be manipulated as he sees fit. The myths and ethics of the early tribes are replaced by central planning for economic growth. Fellow human beings are pawns and slaves to the emperors and the priests.

So physically we all live in Compromateria now, inside the Construct reality. And there's even a carefully programmed PR image version of reality for our minds, for our total enslavement to the ruling elite. But like Mr Anderson in the Hollywood movie, we too can allow our curious other half, the Neo identity, to explore the boundaries of the Matrix and ask the question: What is the Matrix? For there are holes in the Matrix, glitches, and there are people like Morpheus to help us see the world as it really is.

Welcome to the desert of the real. The world may not look very good or attractive from the viewpoint of the real. But nevertheless, it is real. The world of industry and politics and war and capitalism is dead destructive, almost beyond recognition. It is perfectly understandable that people, like the Cypher caracter in the Hollywood movie, will choose the fake, prefer the beautiful, tasty world of the Matrix to the real world. You can't blame them, for the real world looks more and more like a desert, and the last spots of green, wild Nature are swept away in a furious pace.

Nature is, however you choose to see it, what we came from and where we are and are finally going. The body cannot function without the mind, and humanity cannot prevail without the services of Nature. As Daniel Quinn suggests in The Story of B, we are all descendants of men and women who chose to take from Nature, instead of living with Nature. For millions of years, our kind had been living in relative harmony with Nature, and within Nature, before eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge in the garden of Eden, as the Bible puts it, or before taking the control of fire from Zevs, as the ancient Greeks would say. Civilization's own PR people, the makers of the Matrix, ie the priests and politicians, have been spinning the garden of Eden event ever since as the beginning of man. This we know, of course, is utter bullshit.

In a seemingly innocent preview of what was to come, the Takers took the fire that they now had the knowledge to control and use for their purposes, and used it to slash-and-burn nearby forest. This area, the first ever taken from Nature, was then used for agriculture or grazing animals. This in itself didn't harm Nature much, as the early farmers took their slash-and-burn project elsewhere, leaving the exhausted soil to recover. But the new brainchild, that of dominating Nature, was born and would grow ever bigger.

This is where we deviated from the great common biological evolution, and became the demons and destroyers that we are in the eyes of all other species.