No, no. I mean scot free, as in, keeping their mind and soul pure. Anybody intelligent can manipulate the fools around them, by preying on their lack of a mind OR a lack of purpose - you said so yourself, you can do it. But you can’t benefit from the system without accepting that it has a right to exist. And in accepting it has a right to exist, you set yourself up to become a part of it, in which case…well, if you hate how fucked up the world is, congratulations, you’ve just become part of it.
Edit: Merlin, by system I’m loosely referring to the conglomerate of superficially unrelated (everything is connected though, however loosely) people and forces that combine to put those in power in power and maintain the status quo - I don’t believe there’s a conspiracy or anything - I’m just using simplistic terminology both for effect and because it makes things easier to say.
All I’m saying is, that people should be careful when they take your advice of “working the system.” That you stand to lose your individuality, to become a part of the society that you hate, if you accept it for long enough to manipulate people through it. And that doing well in the view of a corrupt, mostly mindless society is no victory at all.
People aren’t stupid and lazy. Most people I see, ‘the masses’, know how to do their job, and do it well. And people certainly aren’t lazy: they’re able to get up and work every day, even the ones with the crappiest work. At worst, you could say people don’t like to think outside the parameters set down by society… but people aren’t stupid and lazy, just unwilling to think about whether or not their lives are ‘right’ or not. And should they?
Indeed. Which is why one must be careful to not be swallowed up by the system becoming dependent on it (like becoming attached to the power you have, or the money you make such that you can’t dissassociate yourself from it and thus get yourself stuck in there, having to constantly compensate for inadequacies that those with more power than you might put you through, to keep what you have that is an integral part of it all). Makes me think of the Matrix. “Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without.”
edit: the bitch is , one has to deal with the system, no matter what, ultimately.So it makes things difficult if one wants to try to stay independent of it when you have no other choice but to interact with it.
But the Merovingian was wrong… one of the main points was that the trap works both ways… remember the speech the old guy made? The humans had the power to destroy the machines that powered Zion, but if they did that, they’d be destroying their own way of life… The manipulators of society, the people at the top, are just as entrapped as the so-called ‘masses’; the ‘intelligent’ people just happen to be more talented.
Actually, that’s up to debate how much power the machine has , as demonstrated by what Neo does to those machines. We know there’s something going on there. Also, the Architect said that the humans could destroy themselves and the robots had a back up plan
And that is what we’re talking about it too. People who manipulate things becoming tied down to what they work with as they’re dependent on it. However, the way power works is that you might be dependent on 1 thing , while other things you might control, creating an interesting circle. So that doesn’t necessarily disprove what I (or Maz) said.
Fuck Paxton, don’t shove my irrelevant and stupid quotes into such a heavy conversation. I never know what the hell I’m talking about, stop making it look like I do.
Originally posted by Astral d_Galloway, was this AP Environmental Science (apes! woo)? That class was pretty sad <.< We made an ecosystem in a bottle… but our fish was too big, and everything died. -_-;
Yeah, it was APES. We had to build an ecosystem, but everyone else refused to listen to me when I said that we needed something in there to give oxygen. The entire thing died out in about 24 hours.
Originally posted by Merlin Yeah, Sin knows a lot about “knowing” he’s better.
Next time your local drama club puts on a Sophocles play, you need to play Tiresias. You have his sullenly ominous pathos down already; all you need now is a set of white rags and a stick to grope around with. Then Sinistral can play Oedipus or Creon or somebody and thunder around tragically while you prophesy his doom in a Grandpa-Simpson voice. And then I’ll play that guy in the chorus who always shows up to comment on the proceedings in order to explain them to the dumber members of the audience. And Zero will have to play the female lead.
I don’t need to go far to find idiots. I love my mom and sister very much but sometimes they just say something that makes absolutely no sense very seriosly. Sometimes when we get in argumenets I pretty much win every time because of this.
Your vaguely substantial/assertive/combative one-line post, with the extremely subtle quotation marks and all, for some reason gave me an image of you in the role of an enigmatic doomy prophet.
meh, whatever, but I’ll let you and Sin and everyone else have the last word though bows I will point out that my vaguely substantial/assertive/combative one-line post was in response to Sin’s personal attack, but if you meant the first first post then fine.