The World We Made

"In Vegas, everybody's gotta watch everybody else. Since the players are looking to beat the casino, the dealers are watching the players. The box men are watching the dealers. The floor men are watching the box men. The pit bosses are watching the floor men. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses. I'm watching the casino manager. And the eye-in-the-sky is watching us all."

―Martin Scorsese's "Casino"

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Dear Kate,

Why are we so prone to create and destroy, often simultaneously as to render both endeavors indistinguishable, the necessary halves of an inevitable, totalizing whole?

Why are we so susceptible to exploitation even as we submit our souls to the exploitation of others?

Why are we so "cheap, fearful, untruthful and evasive" about ourselves and would always frame the narrative of our own downfall as something wrong being done to us by someone else, something out there, "systemic," as if we are not part of the System (or at least not any more)?

These are the very basic questions "The Social Dilemma" (and many other such sort of documentary) could have asked but never will.  Because that's to point out to the audience the most unpleasant obvious: "Hey, folks, we messed up.  Yeah, you did.  I too."  We don't even do that at church, let alone having it done to us while crashing on our couch Netflixing.

All the interviewees in "The Social Dilemma" are geniuses, young, beautiful people, the most brilliant minds who know how to exploit the most brilliant mind as we know this side of heaven: the human mind.

But none of them were able to ask these basic human questions, and, of course, none of them offered anything remotely intelligent for a solution.  How could they?  They couldn't even identify what the problems are.

They would have been smarter human beings if they were a bit more honest about their own human nature.

Almost all of them confessed they were addicted to their own social media creations, that they let themselves be exploited as they exploited others.  Many said they would not let their own kids use social media, not without them following strict guidelines.  Regulate the System! now they propose, after making enough money as sinners and now on their repentant path building moral capital to become saints.  ("The amputation of irrational human needs or wants can only be effected by force.")

How hypocritical, which is to say how little they understand the plight of the mass.  I am a pretty progressive and conversational parent, ever since day one, and I can't even find a way to speak to my teenagers about their cellphone use without risking a civil war.  The most vulnerable children are from the most exploitable families where the parents (if even any) wouldn't have the luxury of time and energy to listen to a sermon on Netflix about why they should suffer the consequence of a problem not even its creators could begin to identify properly.  And who are these genius sermonizers anyway?  They are like environmentalists who used to profit from the oil field for years, so that they now have their pedestal, their pulpit to stand behind and preach about a doom with no salvation in sight.  I will take them seriously if they are to pay back four times the damages they have done.

All the questions, you see, I asked above, are the most basic, fundamental human questions, that right from the get-go the Hebrew Bible addresses.  A story was told us, but we no longer find that story believable, let alone useful, meaningful to how we live today.  It was compellingly re-traditioned throughout the ages as we grappled with the power of technology in our "Second Creation" of a human-made world.  And we told each other many other great stories about ourselves, creatures finite yet sentient of transcendence, impossibly gloried yet utterly fallible. 

So wouldn't it be one of the most intelligible first steps for the Silicon Valley geniuses to suggest to the audience, that to find our way back to the Garden is to know our place in human stories ongoing?  Haven't they read Faust?  In particular Goethe's Faust, who almost loses his soul to Mephistopheles, not for the love of the most beautiful women or even access to knowledge of the world's innermost workings, but the power to part waters and create land, the power of God as depicted in the book of Genesis.  Can't these smartest people admit they were playing God, and not on the puny scale of Victor Frankenstein's?

We have successfully convinced ourselves that there's no eye in the sky; so how are we to look at ourselves now?  We are naked and vulnerable but say we are not.  Here comes COVID and we pray for a vaccine and are now almost getting it, ready to come out to the garden and play again.

But where's the Garden?

Yours, Alex

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