The actors become the heroes. Art becomes life. The stage becomes the world. The performance becomes reality. The worldview becomes the world.
Humanity sits rooted to the bench in Plato's Cave, watching the actors perform the scenes of reality on the big screen TV hanging from their cave wall. Out in the day-to-day bustle of life humanity emulates the actors, their heroes and role models whose images flicker across the comedies, dramas and tragedies of the real reality inside the Cave. The Cave-version of reality that is installed in their brain as their worldview.
Our life is but a shadow of reality, lacking even an appropriate sound track, loud loud loud, then too quiet to hear the whispered words of the actors. Mystery. If only we could get up from our gape-mouthed seats and climb inside that screen. We could be really real too, like the actors.
Civilized life becomes a Greek tragedy, a people bewitched by sorcery, their minds trapped spellbound inside veils of illusions. Illusions of splendor and glory -- the righteous reward of the virtuous victors; amidst the reality of destitution and damnation -- the wages of iniquitous losers.
Real people perform their roles in real life, their minds bewitched by the illusion of a world in which this is how it must be. The bards write the scenes with their invisible hands, and the people act out their parts in the worldview that is written.
The worldview becomes the world. The scenes become inescapable destiny. Who would fail to play the part that was written for them? Sinners! Unbelievers! Malefactors of great hubris, who stoop to believe they can write their own life in this world, live free, find a way across the waters of existence. A way this was not written by the hands of the gods of this worldview. Veil-rippers, who urge the people to come outside the theater and see a real world under the Sun.
Nobody comes. A few. A handful. The bards write them into the play, the damned, doomed to perdition out in the wilderness. Under the 1000 watt studio Sun that stares down upon them, blank and pitiless as the gaze of Yeats' Second Coming, against a baleful dirge -- loud loud loud -- pounding the soundtrack of destruction into our quivering ears and flesh.
The audience mourns innocence lost, sheds a wizened tear for impossible ideals. Freedom. Self-determination. Economic democracy.
The gods write our destiny. We act out our parts. We do not write our own scripts, like those poor doomed idealists. There lies only sorrow and loss.
Neither do we write our own scrips, like those poor doomed American colonists who had the audacity to print their own money! Only the gods can write money into the play. And we are the obedient servants of the gods' will, as it is written in the scripts.
Many have tried to rewrite the scrips -- prophets and reformers. But they were smitten by the gods, and the bards wrote them foolish into the histories.
So the capitalist raft -- this worldview that is draped over the minds of humanity as the curtains on a stage -- plunges headlong toward the lemming-drop falls. All hands on deck scramble for their share of the riches. All hands below deck sweat and strive to hold the beast afloat. All of them know the raft is too big to fail. They know the falls can't be real. The raft is reality. There can be no existential threat to reality. Can there?
So my question to you, standing out there under the Sun, who see and confidently predict and stridently warn that capitalist civilization is already tilting and bucking the rapids before the falls, is,
Why are you still on the raft?
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