Imagine to Remember

In the 1998 novel, Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler introduces us to crumbling society but futuristic society in the year 2024. Those with the means are becoming increasingly addicted to their “dream masks”, a virtual reality device that offers them adventure and escape as the world around them deteriorates. This is also a world in which people are forced into labour through the use of high-tech slave collars. It is a world of company towns, rampant drug use, generational debt, violence and scarce resources. Power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of few, while the multitudes continue to suffer. It is a world that mirrors our own.

The use of technology and the subjugation of people are inextricably linked. It is one of the means by which they are oppressed and are even made complicit in their own oppression. Any technology should be judged by its capacity to serve humanity, not exploit it. We are offered shiny trinkets that seemingly offer us endless joy and wonder. And in a way they do. If you haven’t experienced the real thing our enough of it, can you really discern the difference? A life where all experiences are mediated through one lens or another. A life where the subtle pressure to perform is ever present. How does one experience hunger for something they’ve never had? Any alternative to the status quo is presented as a sort of mirage desert envisioned by idealists. We are told that we are living in the most advanced time in human history and progress is only accelerating, this is another myth the technocrats would have us believe. 

The extent to which we have been denied is hard to understand and what we have been denied is our birthright. Our right to loving relationships with others, with ourselves with the natural world, with God. Constant entertainment destroys our ability for sustained presence and focus. We are all at least partly at blame for mistaking spectacle, the shadows on the wall for the real thing. If things “progress” as planned our children and their children maybe even worse off as each successive generation becomes more separated, from Source and from self.