The End of the Speed Limit on the Highway to Nowhere
The End of the Speed Limit on the Highway to Nowhere
“…The modern project to achieve perfection and total control is a technological Faustian effort to transcend our humanity, now with artificial intelligence, digital dementia, and the marriage of the human to the machine. This mad quest goes by many names (Lewis Mumford presciently called it The Myth of the Machine), but it is always directed by ruling elites to gather more power to themselves. Today it is called the Great Reset, using medical technology and “vaccines” as the leading edge of its spear to disembowel our humanity. It may succeed because so many people have lost a rootedness in the lived spiritual experience of a sacred vision of an escape from our enigma. With this loss, they have lost the utopian vision that inspires hope when there is no hope.”
The End of the Speed Limit on the Highway to Nowhere
by Edward Curtin, Behind the Curtain
October 1, 2021
There was a time when time was time and space and speed had some human meaning, for people lived within the limits of the natural world of which they were a part.
As Albert Camus said, “In our madness, we push back the eternal limits, and at once dark Furies swoop down upon us to destroy.”
The destruction is now upon us.
In former days you could cross over to other people’s lives and come back with a different perspective, knowing what was obvious was true and that to exist meant to be composed of flesh and blood like all the others in different places and to be bound by the natural cycles of life and death, spring and fall, summer and winter. There were limits then, on the land, water, and even in the sky, where space too had dimensions and the stars and planets weren’t imaginary landing strips for mad scientists and their partners in celluloid fantasies.
In that rapidly disappearing world where people felt situated in space and time, life was not yet a holographic spectacle of repetitive images and words, a pseudo-world of shadowy figures engaging in pseudo-debates on electronic screens with people traveling from one place to another only to find that they never left home. When the mind is homeless and the grey magic of digital propaganda is its element, life becomes a vast circinate wandering to nowhere. The experience of traveling thousands of miles only to see the same chain of stores lining the same roads in the same towns across a country where the same people live with their same machines and same thoughts in their same lives in their same clothes. A mass society of mass minds in the hive created by cell phones and measured in nanoseconds where the choices are the freedom to choose what is always the same within a cage of categories meant to render all reality a “mediated reality.”
Without roots we are like Sisyphus pushing his rock not up the hill but in circles, only to reach what we think is the end is the beginning again. Runners in the circle game.
People’s roots were what once gave them distinction, a place to stand against the liquid flow of modernity and its disillusionments. These roots were cultural and geographic, material and spiritual. They went deep. Such rootedness was not a panacea, simply a place to take a stand. It gave a bit of stability, the sense of real existing individuals with identities, histories, ground under their feet. It was possible to meet others as different but equally human despite their different roots, and to grasp our common reality. It was the antithesis of globalization, of sameness. It was diversity before there was fake diversity.
The idea of roots has become even more complicated since Simone Weil wrote her well-known book, The Need for Roots, in 1943. Even then she admitted this:
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define.
So I will not try to do so. Like so much in life, it’s reality involves both a yes and a no, like our relationship to time.
For we have always been time-bound creatures, caught in its mystery, and we always will be. This was true before the invention of clocks, although the clock ushered in a technological revolution from which we’ve never looked back. Most people are now on speed going nowhere.
cover image credit: Karen_Nadine / pixabay