The red pill is love
Metaverse’s big mistake is in thinking we need to live in a fantasy world.
We do already.
Most obviously, the world of the smartphone. Watch the addicts walk blindly into traffic, ignore company at social gatherings to type blether, game and surf.
… and saw a world ruled by dreamers and liars. No wonder so many people make references to the Matrix movies.
We are encouraged to regard God as a ridiculous Flying Spaghetti Monster but to take seriously what Charles Hugh Smith calls the Saviour State. Every individual politician is guyed as an ignorant clown but collectively they will look after us, won’t they.
They don’t, of course, but in a postmodernist world there is no such thing as reality (that principle is the wellspring of our madness) - so what matters is to manage perceptions.
Ever since Tony Blair swished into Number Ten I have felt that I was living inside someone else’s formless dream. That was no accident: Blair and his depressive bully Alastair Campbell are believers (if we may use that word) in ‘narrative,’ hence their focus on ‘eye-catching initiatives.’
We are deracinated from reality. We have no personal narrative. We exist only as consumers, and finally we cease to exist.
If we are nothing then, we are nothing now. Nothing comes of nothing.
Not even existentialism. Sartre’s nihilist belief in ‘le Néant’ didn’t stop him grabbing the job of a Jewish professor ousted by the Vichy regime, wasting much life-time writing 700 pages to prove that ‘Man is a useless passion’ or canning his strictly individualist philosophy in favour of Marxist collectivism during the 1968 Paris student riots. Nor, I think, did he consider why, if all projects are vain, we should seek to be authentic.
An alternative, positive response to ‘the vanity of human wishes’ is the Chinese concept of ‘ren’ (or ‘jen’): human-heartedness. When our ego dissolves, love for others is revealed; I think Russell Brand is on that path now - listen to him reflect on his own former egotistical anger here (from 10:14).
Nothing comes of nothing. Except the universe.
We cannot live like babies, bought off with whatever the Saviour State crams into our mouths and letting it channel our rage into vicarious military conflicts fought for no clear benefit. Words like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are used as battle-cries against other countries so that our rulers can avoid being made to look in the mirror. The dreams they give us are mad, infantile, dangerous.
We need a human-hearted understanding if we are to avoid the apocalypse.