“According to Google, Fight Club, a film in which radicals destroy skyscrapers (containing credit records) in order to erase debt, was initially released on September 10, 1999 (Wikipedia shows the date as October 15). 2 years later, nearly to the day, buildings containing incredible caches of records and evidence disappear in one of the most bizarre and structurally unlikely events in modern world history.

I am not concerned here with conspiracy; at least, not in the ordinary sense. My concern is that American culture is a bit like the estranged and damaged aspects of a given person’s subconscious mind. The media machines spin out plots and options for masquerade, and the general population embodies and lives these out. Conservative, liberal, and revolutionary. There doesn’t seem to be much awareness of this in the people. Hollywood and television… the internet and … yes, books… are telling us how to feel, what to become.

There’s nothing new about this. But what I recognize here is the rich relationship to our own minds, in which, in ways that are at once personal and shared, something similar is afoot. There’s this spin factory deeply associated with what we know as our personal identity. Dreaming is the better part of it. The rotten part is more like Hollywood, courtrooms, or the news: a self-aggrandizing con-game built from the ground up upon illusions and spectacle. The faculties that assemble and promote these fictions do not -have- to be used in these ways, and have many noble applications; but we ‘catch’ this paradigm during ongoing exposure to the cultures where that generate and optimize it for both penetration and contagion.

What the mainstream media is producing is largely indoctrination product. And there’s nothing behind it. Or, worse, there’s a hungry, self-harming, addiction-generating call to a form of trance-like obedience that masquerades as fashionable, masterful, or ‘cool’, when in fact it is primarily predatory, inductive, and completely disinterested in the body of human converts that comprise its ostensible petri dish.

What we too often call ‘the ego’ is, perhaps, much like our inner Hollywood. It spins myths to us of our victimization and our ‘rights’, showing us stories that, rather than lift us from passive victims into active agents… tend to keep us crippled. But this is not really ‘the ego’ as I understand it. More properly, this description belongs to specific faculties of the ego that act this way when warped, again, by exposure to their extrinsic model: the spectacles of culture and media that flow in endless answer to our hunger for an image of ourselves worth inhabiting.

How ironic that we brought that with us into human birth, and lost it in the hall of mirrors that human culture presents as the only possible solution to our desire for its return.”

— an anonymous informant