Traps set by the machine

[Requia ☣]

This is mostly a laundry list of things I've identified as set ups that keep people hooked up to the machine.  They may or may not be anything original in it, mostly trying to collect my thoughts and get people to point out anything I've missed.

The money game, the idea that more money (above and beyond what you actually need)=better.  One of the stronger traps, as most people only manage to get it by being 100% in tune with the machine.  Corporate drones and artistic sellouts.

Conformist rebellion.  Corporate driven subculture, relatively weak trap, keeps people feeding money into the machine, and marks potential troublemakers as outcasts, preventing them from doing any real damage.

Groupthink counterculture.  Political and ideological movements, usually very conformist in goals, in the past you'd see a lot of communists and hippies (according to history books anyway, wasn't around then), these days you seem get libertarians.

Politics, in general.  I think it was the BIP, might have been a forum post here, talked about politics forcing you to choose between freedoms.  Somewhere I have a chart done up of mindsets in a large political forum, showed a very hard line trend towards this kind of thinking.  The two politicians you get to choose from tend to be minimally different outside of key issues as well.

The popularity contest.  All the good cogs in the machine are expected to act in a certain way so everybody will like them.  Caring what other people think, simply for the sake of being liked, seems a fast track to giving up your will to the machine.

entertainment, in general.  TV, alcohol, sex, music, video games, drugs, anything to distract the masses from looking at their plight.  And keep them spending of course.  Trickier one to get ahold than the others, not dangerous in moderation, and not clean cut either, some entertainment can serve to try and wake people up from a cabbage state.  Need not actually be created by the machine.

Religion, in general.  established religion is pretty obvious.  fringe religion is a poor means of control, but seems to at least serve as a distraction.

anybody have anything I missed?

[Coyote]

Hope.

coyote

[AFK]

Human Nature

[LMNO]

Tribes/territorialism.

Moving from physical territory to mental/emotional/idealistic territory.


People acting like monkeys.

[hooplala]

[Requia ☣]

I completely forgot about conspiracy theories.  Can't really see the machine if you think a shadow government or a bunch of guys with skull rings is doing it all.

[Jasper]

Monkeys acting like people.

[Cramulus]

"self preservation" as a justification

[Jasper]

What about the illusion of safety?

[TheLastLump]

I found one. It's the School system.

The machine grades its beef by making it perform. If you're incapable of making the grade, you're marked for nothing important in life. If you make the grade and do what they tell you, you succeed, but along their guidelines. If, however, you don't follow the rules but show high intelligence? You're labeled a wild card. They target you for induction into the machine so you don't become another loose bolt getting stuck in the gearheads, messing up the design...

[Verbal Mike]

I found one. It's the School system.

The machine grades its beef by making it perform. If you're incapable of making the grade, you're marked for nothing important in life. If you make the grade and do what they tell you, you succeed, but along their guidelines. If, however, you don't follow the rules but show high intelligence? You're labeled a wild card. They target you for induction into the machine so you don't become another loose bolt getting stuck in the gearheads, messing up the design...

True, but not as true as it used to be. These days many of the most "successful" people were pegged by the schooling system as failures. I might be hopelessly optimistic in thinking so, but I believe the whole monster machine of schooling in the Western world is on the brink of collapse. I believe it will be sudden, but that it is inevitable.

(On the other hand, I have been known to be a fanatic supporter of Sudbury schools, so feel free to ignore me on this one.)

[TheLastLump]

True, but the school system still makes it harder to rise if you fail to do anything and everything they ask you, regardless of how irrelevent it is. Still, I wouldn't be the rebel I am today if it wasn't for the Jungle that was school...

[Thelaughingman421]

The school sysytem is like a big cog production facility. It gets you ready for a whole life of turning in the Machine. What Lumpy says is true, however, I never wouldn't have found the BIP if it wasn't for school.

[Cramulus]

Schools are definitely part of the machine. The school system isn't about giving you the skills you need to work. It's about socializing you so that you'll fit in at the workplace. A high school, bachelors, masters degree represents that you're willing to jump through that many hoops. The reason it's such a big part of the machine is that by participating, you just make it more real. Since nearly everyone in this country graduates from High School, it seems very very important to do so. I've known many high school drop outs who went on to be very successful... but they all speak about how they had to overcome people's initial misgivings.

[LMNO]

And yet, very few people on this site would reccomend a person not go to school.

Please see the "choose where I go to college" thread in AppleTalk.