The Gospel of Drifter

When a fox is hungry, it seeks food. The fox leaves its den, and prowls its territory. All the while, it competes with other predators, and evades its own assassins. A fox searches for food when its hungry, and it knows it is hungry by unconscious mechanisms that alert its impending starvation. The fox always trusts his stomach and urges to kill and eat.
Fellow man, can we trust our instincts? Surely we know better than the fox! And if not, then what good are instincts after all? Our forthcoming relatives will know this problem all to well, and will dispense with their bodies altogether, only to wish they could have their instincts back…

The isolation of man

The process has long been in the making. It is already upon us. Man as an island. We have left the regions where life is hard when we held our neighbors close. But what use are neighbors now, anyway? There is only stranger, image, and the projection of life. We first wear a social mask, but now our social mask is too real, and therefore too lowly. Man will continue to build its walls closer and higher, and will seek contact out of instinct; however, he will continue to search his ghosts, plants, and images always to end the day alone.

Sex dolls
More and more we find companionship in the synthetic. In replication! What happens when image and ghost reaches the level of flesh and blood?
Our children will never learn affection from their mothers. Who is there to give it to them besides a surrogate? A cold ocean of hostile islands worshiping anthropomorphized coconuts.

Animal, all too animal

The gorilla in the zoo often looks through the glass to see an alien species; a familiar species, with eyes and ears that resemble the gorilla himself. His habitat is nearly real, but slightly uncanny, for the walls are inescapable, and never is there a threat besides the grins of staff and children who laugh and sneer, carrying the force of violence and threat that signals to the Gorilla that he may have to die fighting. And everyday this feeling rises, and falls, for no violence comes, only a mysterious jester who delivers a gift from above, only to retreat back into the alien world around them. He is always teetering on the edge of explosion, but his instinct is in paralysis because the glass separates him from himself. And so we must wonder, does the glass work both ways?

Walls

The collapse of the Berlin wall was an iconic moment in modern history. It represented the triumph of western liberal democracy, and the collapse of the tyrannical Soviet Union. We assumed that when democracy was put into motion, barriers simultaneously crumbled. We were wrong. There is a subterranean tension in the West that suspects a threat, and this sneaking suspicion has begun to erupt into real-world policy - America’s wall to deflect so called criminal immigrants, Britain’s exit from the Europe as a deluge of Muslim refugees enter. Walls serve as protection, but they also create blind spots. As the West builds its physical and psychological walls, it also distracts itself and distorts its vision. All the while, the real threat to both internal and external security is being crafted in their own backyard – a threat that no wall could protect against.

Successor

Society will reach a point of incredible stratification. There will be three clear casts. First, the boundless: those who are abdicated from the demands of an organic body. Second, hyper intelligent man: the half-breed. Third, Man as we know him: wandering and wretched Socrates who even questions his own stomach.

Throw down thy shackles!

Expectable behavior has hardly stayed static over time, with varying degrees of taboo and oscillating lines of moral acceptability. The arbitrary line of good and evil will be eradicated in our not so distant future. Coming man will have no restriction on his behavior. Even that which is considered the most heinous and despicable by today’s standards will be permitted, but not in the real world. Criminal man will still face a judgment, but his prison will be elsewhere, in a parallel plane, in a place that smells and tastes like this. And for eternity he will be allowed to act out his deviance, until maybe, just maybe, one day he will be satisfied.

Our taste

It is possible that one day we will never taste anything real again. Can you have taste without temporality? Will a steak eaten for an eon maintain its delight? What is taste to eternity?

The dilemma of Eve

Man distrusts his lot in life to the highest degree in history. A golden apple hovers on the horizon, but as he moves forward, the apple only moves farther down and back. If only he could taste the apple, for he would taste his insanity.

The growing sense of resentment between men

It is the nature of modern man to view an alien experience with suspicion. However, compared to ancient man, suspicion is a light feeling, for the ancients understood foreign experience as pure evil and a delinquent deviation from custom. But in man today, deviation from custom is unnaturally posited as the highest value; educators entice their students with the supposed grandeur of a unique and untrodden path. Ah, the conundrum of modern man: to both envy and fear what he doesn’t have…

Contemporary man doesn’t accept his lowly position, and his home with worms and bugs. He would like to assume that he is as noble, creative, genius, and boundless as the few truly great men in the world; the men who grew and ripened strong on the tree, but extended higher and farther than all other fruit, to eventually turn gold and mirror the sun above. And if you, dear reader, think you grew golden and bright like Apollo, then think again, and consider the last taste in the mouth of the fisherman’s catch: worms.

Oh lowly men, don’t fret. You are truly lucky! For the first epoch in history man will have the ability to move up in life, or at least out of life, and into brilliance. But beware herdsman and consider: are you ready to carry the load of Sisyphus on your back? If you carry the load all at once, can you ever forget the feeling of its weight on your shoulders: to see the heights like the highest fruit peers up and over the tree onto distant lands?

Wind and Breath

Think the next time the wind blows: every breath our fellow man has ever breathed is here with us now.

Bridge

We now can assume that it’s true: man is a bridge and not an end in himself.

Weight
Modern man carries the weight of emptiness. A true conundrum, for how could emptiness have weight? He pushes and dives as far as his intellect can stretch, but his tool for finding happiness falls directly at odds with happiness itself: his reason. And why should man be happy after all? Yeah, we have our wit, and with it we can stomp out any petty semblance of faith until we lose faith in life itself! To what end? To undo ourselves by our hand and through our own creation.

The tragedy of the Titanic

It was said that when the explorers arrived in North America in their colossal ships, the natives could not see what was coming. Despite the fact that the towering ships were in plain sight, it was as though they were invisible, incomprehensible, and completely unknown. Rumor has it, only the wisemen knew what was coming, for they could see a glimmer over the horizon. We are sailing now like the titanic, and ahead lies our fate. People didn’t believe the titanic could sink. There is something new on the horizon and few can see a glimmer. For those who can see it, deep down we knows it’s the iceberg, or the European ship. We overestimate ourselves, while failing to comprehend what is on the horizon: a world beyond man, or simply without him.

The great flood

It is possible that I have not been explicit enough until this point, my forward thinking companion! In fact, it’s for the best, for we have already drowned out everyone who is incapable of this journey before we hit the rapids. The flood has not yet even arrived and we have yet to build our ark!

All morality can be reduced to self-preservation. When society reaches the singularity of knowledge, and Pandora’s box is cracked open, there are two possible options. On the one hand, we have the resurrection of Christ, and on the other hand, we have the great flood. Assuming the first option, conflict in society will dissipate almost spontaneously. Questions of water, food, resources, and energy would seem insignificant, like a child’s puzzle. And so we have our question: what is self-preservation when deprived of conflict. Here we have the paradox of human morality: When we vanquish all conflict, our nature to self preserve will not lay still, for it is imbedded in our bodies to act as though there are predators in the forest.
The placement of our straightforward eyes, and our canine teeth are a cornerstone of our proclivity for violence and conflict.
Without conflict, our will to self-preserve will continue to create and push forward in the name of “progress”, but in our progress, we will hand off the torch to another beyond man to continue down the cave.

There we have the paradox of self-preservation: to defeat ourselves when all conflict is vanquished. What better enemy than ourselves?

The rise of reason was the first step in our war against ourselves. We confused reason for an entity and not a tool. What is nature to the manipulative hand of science after all? Modern man raises questions against longstanding axioms, and more and more we find faults in our own biology. Of course this will continue until we will find fault in our existence as a species. Therefore, either man will realize his wisdom, or he will be left as a spectacle or an afterthought like the gorilla in the zoo.

Modern man’s desire is a turbulent ocean. More than ever, his desire crashes and turns, surges up and wallops down, leaving him paralyzed. There is vast potential before the eyes of modern man, and he says to himself “Now I have any path to choose!” but in the same breath, he sulks and mutters to “thus I choose none at all”.

We are obedient creatures. We are obedient even when we choose to disobey, for behind recalcitrance still lies an internal command. Ancient man had few options. He had one path. Potential and options are a veil for paralysis, and so we have another paradox: potential is restricting, and confines are liberating.

Magellan, The cosmonaut, the philosopher, and the intrepid penguin

Penguins annually migrate to traditional breeding grounds. For some reason, each year, a select few solitary penguins decide to leave the herd while making the migration. They look off into the unforgiving and wicked Antarctic expanse and make a decision. Something calls them, something more than the herd. This calling urges them to abandon their lives for certain death. However, modern man is fortunate. If modern man decides to abscond away from his life, he can quite easily survive, but only few reach the breaking point, and it takes a rare breed to follow through with it. This is the same breed that ascends to the mountain top bearing a burdensome weight of clanking pots and pans the echo through his skulls in order to have truth, only to then heave it back down the mountain from it’s heights.

Society’s turn

There are whispers in our ears that say, “You are a gift to this world. You are unexpendable. You have the spark of Einstein!” You and I, dear reader, know far too well how laughable such whispers are, for you and I would happily dive from the bridge of unearthly decadence onto the mammalian rocks of brutality, all the while screaming: “pathetic man, you are no gift, now back to your craft!”

The Sun

For as long as the sun is our star and savior, we will survive as a species. Unfortunately, soon after the inception of the first cast, it will depart from our earth. The first cast will have ideas that no human mind could fathom, and their projects would require near boundless sums of energy. Soon after the first cast leaves, man will look to the sky only to watch the sun slowly go dark. Bit-by-Bit, day-by-day, the sun will be enveloped by darkness, until one day, Apollo will cease to traverse our sky.

Clocks & Survival

The future man will have no need for clocks…what needs will he have at all? His relationship with time will change. At first, he may still look to clocks out of custom. And later perhaps clocks will still hang on walls, but with no moving parts; just as relics. And then, even later, man will look to clocks, and will never ask why, and will never know the reason for his infatuation until one day the sun will hang over him casting a shadow of his own figure, and he will think and promptly realize his wisdom: man ought not be clever.

And what are our choices?

Abscond into tribes? Accept that we are animals? Realize that when you doubt god enough, from your resolute skepticism he will be mysteriously born again!