“To ascend above the dialectic and to achieve some unity of vision is to sever oneself from the rest of humanity. Because all the rest of humanity is firmly embedded in the dialectic. If you express political opinions that don’t align with left or right, no one knows what to do with you. They don’t even want to talk to you. There’s a certain joy in being a part of a group and standing against the opposite side.
“People that can see both sides and that they’re both manipulated, you will become so isolated that you’re no longer a problem. You can’t affect the world, you can’t affect your fellow man.
“There’s a sense in which, just like in The Matrix when Neo and many like him were allowed to leave the Matrix and go to Zion. The machines intended for that. If you stay in the Matrix as an enlightened person, you break the system, the programming, and you break it for other people. So what they want, when you become enlightened, so-to-speak, you’re exactly where they want you.
“It’s a paradox. I don’t want to be deceived, I don’t want my perceptions managed; but if you manage to transcend that, then you’re not really living among human beings anymore; you’re kind of ethereal. Your brain doesn’t interface, now, with your fellow man. It’s a lonely place to be.
“This is why Chipher in the Matrix, wanted to go back. He said ‘Screw reality, I want the illusion again. I don’t even want to remember that it is an illusion. Just give me that juicy steak, don’t tell me its fake.’
“So that’s where I’m at. It is so utterly isolating to not be able to cheer for a team because you can see the seams in it. It’s like a Potemkin Village: from a distance it looks like a village. Up close it just looks like a bunch of flat panels propped up to look like a village. There’s no depth there.
“Everything I’ve ever looked at — everything from religion to history, movement; you look close enough you will see the seams, the contradictions, how this group is being manipulated by that group, and everyone in this group thinks they’re fighting for this, but, in fact, the one who’s funding it is fighting for that; and that no one suffering and dying on a battlefield is actually bleeding and dying for what he thinks he’s bleeding and dying for.”
–The Alchemical Catholic
Breathings 