The Man-Machine

During the industrial revolution mankind saw the impetus behind time change from one based on seasonal changes to one based on a consumerist platform. With huge, mechanical clocks erected in the center of villages and towns like neo-obelisks, time was streamlined to prompt the building of the man-machine. Today this ideological vanguard (the man-machine) is used as the imperialistic staple in a manifold of ways, including as assembly lines in car manufacturing plants, and as the symmetrical alignment of stock exchanges dispersed throughout the planet.

Destruction is imminent if we depend upon three things to carry us through the wilderness of ourselves: the desire for money, the desire for sex, and the desire to obey the industrialized distortion of time. This triadic function in humanity accounts for the heaps of wastelands we see as ghastly scars on the earth, the patronizing and objectification of women, and our general impatience when it comes to healing our minds and our communities. We could even say this synthesis of depravity embosses us with the most unsettling characteristic of them all: alienation. This part in our collective psyche is an antipode to progress. It existentially sparkles in us as the polished protuberance of narcissism.

Mental sickness is hard to track down appropriately given the predicament we find ourselves in with the multitude of our desires. As soon as we blame a mental sickness in a bias fashion, we’re entranced by this alienation. Externally we let it grow as smoke stacks billowing noxious effluents into the perfect blue skies. It is easy for us to say schizophrenia is a mental disease and retardation is humorous, but what we don’t realize is that we impart our own sicknesses to the surrounding atmosphere when we speak contemptuously of our fellow men and women. Perhaps something far more devastating than we can likely assume within the boundaries of our experiences will come from this. That is the anesthetizing of our world by the exaltation of self-righteousness.

I don’t purport to know how time and desire have made the narcissistic man or woman, but for the sake of producing a sound theory let’s say we are like predators playing with an interminable concept. Even after a predator has hunted down its prey and disemboweled the entrails, or in terms of the animal human, the predator has exercised one’s carnality, is the predator ever satisfied with the results? For an evanescent stretch of time perhaps it is. But after it has vanquished one, why wouldn’t the predator want to go for more and more? After awhile, this type of insatiable urge becomes a fulcrum pathology, and within it desire is mistaken to be a necessity of survival.

Staying true to this fulcrum pathology, could we say we have done the same with the conceptualization of time? Maybe we have invested too much time into desiring a model of perfunctory ideals, and henceforth, created a model that says consumerism is survival, and the narcissist should dominate and ensure the survival of this model? When in reality, we should set our desires on the inward ground of mysticism, and the promise of cosmological understanding that results from the patient studying of the mind.

Maybe we should look at time in two different ways: one as a mystical perspective, and one as the current perspective of the man-machine.

When we look at a clock, two hands direct us to a conjecture of time. In a sense, time looks like a clock made of two hands, but antithetically, a bigger picture of time has nothing to do with clocks. The bigger picture of time has nothing to do with clocks because it has everything to do with the jagged edges of our memories. Our memories aren’t automatic like clocks because they exist in the gulf of our dreams. In this sense we cannot place dreams within the two hands of a clock when we use them in context to anything because we can’t pinpoint the circumference or center of our dreams. The irrationality in claiming dreamtime looks like clock-time is clearly apparent, yet we have been quite mulish in claiming that we don’t dream when we look at clocks, and dreaming is something that happens only when we fall asleep.

The Man-Machine will die only when the way we perceive time dies.