The Evil Machine

The Searuvel, the Evil Machine, was meant to vanquish the Adversarial Dragon.  Heroic humanist Man dicovered, invented, science and technology.  The Searuvel was to be 'our dragon', a magic servitor conjured from the forces of wild Nature to meet our needs and desires.  "How clever of us!  What an ornament to human pride!  We really are as gods: with a wish and a will we can do anything.  Eventually we will make of this world a garden city where life is very pleasant, we are saved from hard labor and afflictions inherent in bodily existence, and marvelous noble entertainments will make existence a blessing."  But everything has two faces, and what was so self-evidently Good became evil.  Our magic servitor has addicted and enslaved us.  The machines we cannot do without, necessary to life, now outnumber, outweigh us.  They are the Power now.  We cannot help but model ourselves on them, but we realize we can never be as capable-- they are godlike, they are the master race.  The entire planet is a Machine Regime.  They have colonized the world-- Man and Nature-- working in the open, with our full support!  We invented our supplanters out of our own vaunting brilliance, but now we scurry and sweat, to give this machine greater reach and puissance, giving the best in us to magnify this terrible Techno-dragon.  And what do we get as payment?  A diminishing of our substance.  We are addicted, weakened, made stupid, blind, abased, degraded.  We have become wretched slaves who were once proud masters.  When we discovered what we had engineered with full overweening confidence, we lost the drive and the will and magnificent arrogance.  And now we are trapped in the moils of 'our dragon', and like all conquerors, it accepts no limits to its magnification, and will destroy both us and itself, as well as Nature-- the Uroboros that created us is displaced, used up, annihilated. 

Is there nothing we can do against this evil machine, this Searuvel, to stop it before it destroys the Earth?  Well, if we could all just 'come to' from the spell of delusion that has possessed us, it would be a start.

The Searuvel is vulnerable, though; it has a fatal weakness-- it is a dead thing.  Not a living, organic, biotic system.  It is not self-generating, self-sustaining.  It requires ever increasing infusions of human energy, libido, soul.  Like a world-vampire, it must suck the life out of the living.  But if humanity ever came out of its stupor, we would stop feeding the Techno-dragon, for this undead Thing must grow or disintegrate-- stop the influx of life-force and it quickly shows its brittleness-- it crumbles, melts.  The dilemma, though, is that without the Searuvel to support us, we, too, would die, civilization would collapse, a frenzied self-annihilation would overtake desperate humanity.  Our minds cannot go there, we cannot consider this option.  But wait-- there is a chance, if, recognizing the real situation, we make a plan-- not to kill the Dragon, but to collectively withdraw our psychic involvement in it, to assimilate its functions and powers into an analog developed to serve Life-- all life, not just Lord Man the mighty conqueror and ruler of All.  If we made this our great, last ditch Project, Life might have a chance.  But we'll never know until we really try, invest all we've got into this enterprise.  And it starts with a person making a decision.