Remote Control
This is excerpted from my journal...
I was struck the other night with how good a metaphor Darth Vader is for modern, civilized humans. When Obi Wan Kenobi says, "He's more machine now than man...", I think that expresses it well. Civilization has acclimated people (and people created civilization, so it's a self-perpetuating cycle) to moving at the pace of technology, everything only a click away, so that the gradual processes of nature are not even something most of us know how to relate to anymore. Sometimes when I am talking, I can see the other person's eyes flicker with impatience if I take more than, say, ten seconds to get to what they consider to be the "point" of the story. It's like processes don't mean anything anymore, only results. In that way, I consider us to be masked and detached from experience in much the way that Darth Vader is...human underneath, certainly, but how many layers we have to remove before we find it. We think that this is the natural destiny of humanity, and we have reached this state inevitably. We'd rather be machine than animal, because that confers some kind of illusory immortality. Machines don't die, at least not the way flesh does. We have "saved" ourselves by first removing ourselves from the paltry laws which govern all other beings, and have rebuilt a new and improved world around us which is deceptively more stable than the far too mortal one of fleshy organisms, yet in reality this new world is a time bomb ticking away...but as we listen more closely we realize that the time bomb is really our hearts, about to explode in our chests. You can only ignore your primal roots for so long...
I was struck the other night with how good a metaphor Darth Vader is for modern, civilized humans. When Obi Wan Kenobi says, "He's more machine now than man...", I think that expresses it well. Civilization has acclimated people (and people created civilization, so it's a self-perpetuating cycle) to moving at the pace of technology, everything only a click away, so that the gradual processes of nature are not even something most of us know how to relate to anymore. Sometimes when I am talking, I can see the other person's eyes flicker with impatience if I take more than, say, ten seconds to get to what they consider to be the "point" of the story. It's like processes don't mean anything anymore, only results. In that way, I consider us to be masked and detached from experience in much the way that Darth Vader is...human underneath, certainly, but how many layers we have to remove before we find it. We think that this is the natural destiny of humanity, and we have reached this state inevitably. We'd rather be machine than animal, because that confers some kind of illusory immortality. Machines don't die, at least not the way flesh does. We have "saved" ourselves by first removing ourselves from the paltry laws which govern all other beings, and have rebuilt a new and improved world around us which is deceptively more stable than the far too mortal one of fleshy organisms, yet in reality this new world is a time bomb ticking away...but as we listen more closely we realize that the time bomb is really our hearts, about to explode in our chests. You can only ignore your primal roots for so long...