The Prison

Themes:

We live in a prison.
- We are prisoners of a civilizational system that compels us to destroy the world to survive.
- We have made a prison of the planet, where humans and the planet have been made captive.


The prison is a cultural one. It works a little something like this: Live the way you're told to, or else, you don't get fed. What this means is that we must participate in the prison, or else we don't survive.

To call it a prison strikes some people as odd, even dangerous, perhaps. The reason is simple: they don't know they're in the prison. Some people do well in the prison, some people are comfortable in the prison, but they are in it, nontheless.

The reason they don't see it as a prison is that they assume the prison is the only choice, it's the only way to live. If all you knew, from birth to death, was the inside of the prison, and never had a chance to see the outside, to see the walls and bars keeping you in, you'd have no idea what you were in was even a prison at all. I have seen the bars. I have seen the outside. It is most certainly a prison.

Once you realize you're inside, of course, you feel trapped. Look at the tiger in a cage. He's either pacing, pacing, always pacing, or he's lethargic, and has lost the vigor of life. He knows he's in a cage, it would be hard not to know. The bars and walls are ever present, they can easily be seen. Once you know where to look, once you understand what the bars and the walls are made of, you cannot help but to pace, just like the tiger.

The prison is well designed, and very well maintained. The prison has grown over time, and now covers the majority of the planet. There are still patches where the world is still free, but the goal is, of course, to put all of those in the prison as well. Those who still live outside of the prison are truly the most endangered species on the planet.

The bars of the prison are all ideas, they are all cultural traditions passed down over the generations. They are few, and they are simple. The food in the prison is under lock and key, and living in the prison is the only truly human way to live. There are other things keeping us in, but they all fundamentally rely on these two ideas. If either of these notions were to fall, the prison would open up wide.