You know that the world is a lie and yet you choose to believe it anyways. At the very center of your world, the core of your belief, nestled somewhere near the thing that you may or may not call your soul, you participate in and encourage the fiction of the world. Everything that you pretend to be certain of is a lie, you know this, and yet you go on anyways. If you faced the facts, if you looked the world in it's metaphorical eye, then you would freeze up and turn into metaphorical stone just as if the world itself was a basilisk, a medusa, or any of the other 'fictional' creatures that we have invented to tell us that looking too closely at certain things will kill you. We know that the world is a cockatrice, but it is our cockatrice, and so we dance with it anyways.

We fear the dark, the unknown, the places where mold grows and fills the air with fetid scents that we convince ourselves must be poison. We forge differences between the dark and the light. We speak of darkness as a thing that can be counted, we imbue it with degrees of being and claim that there can be more darkness here, less there, and ask it to have a substance so that we can place it in a box. We pretend that darkness grows, that it exists in the positive, when night 'falls' we claim that darkness 'gathers'. Yet darkness does not exist. If there is anything, in the proper sense, there is only light. Darkness is not a thing, it is an absence, a lack, that can be felt more or less keenly but all those differences in value are made of 'feeling'. We speak of sensibilities as though they were senses.

It is fear that grows, it is mystery, uncertainty, it is a pronounced awareness of our fundamental and absolute lack of perception that 'falls' at night and 'gathers' in the gloom. Darkness is simply the fiction we use to pretend that it is some force or object outside of ourselves that makes us blind.

We only speak of darkness as though it were evil because the slight slice of perception that we have comes from the fraction of the light spectrum that we can actually see. We describe darkness as the unknowable and yet it is only unknown in a highly specific way. Soldiers have goggles to compensate for such things. If you did not demand so much of light then you would not fear the dark. Bats 'see' with sound. They scorn the light. To a bat it is of no consequence except that they become more visible to their prey, light is an inconvenience not a phobia. It is the embodiment of the unknowable that generates fear, the thing that forces you to acknowledge the crutch you have so long relied upon to shamble through life while pretending to run. For a bat the embodiment of fear is a synthetic sound absorbing foam that all of their howls of desperation are swallowed by. A bat's nightmares are filled with bright rooms possessing soft walls.

To find oneself in a bright room with padded walls is the safest of all possible places because even if you wanted to you could not come to harm. Yet it is also the most terrifying because it implies the possibility that what you believe to exist or think that you see is absolutely uncertain. The bat screams and begs the walls to release its cries and return them so that it might, by hearing its own shouted question, know where it is and where the walls are that lock it in place. It is the sound of its own voice that tells the bat what to see. You too tell yourself what to see.

You fear bats. You think that bats are disgusting and filthy creatures that wait for you in the darkness. They transform in the shadows, into something terrible that looks just like you, that sounds like you, that can mesmerize you, suck your blood, taint your soul... but only if you give it permission to enter. The best news that you can get, the only good news that you can get once the vampire has entered your room, is that simply letting it know that you have belief defeats it. Show it your cross, brandish your absolute 'faith' in some kind of foundation and the vampire turns comical, it bares its fangs and is revealed to be a simple beast, it hisses helplessly, enraged, and turns into ash after being ever so lightly brushed by some isolated shaft of the light.

Darkness does not exist, it is something that you have invented to deny your dependence upon the light. You fear those things that thrive in darkness not because they are strong when you are weak; most things that live in darkness are pale and feeble and slow, even the one species of bat that can actually bite you is small enough to fit within the palm of a pre-adolescent child. You fear things that thrive in darkness and inflate them into monsters because you must. You must believe in the greatness of light because it is the means by which you 'see' the world and if you were to accept the limitations and flaws of that perception then you would have to acknowledge the existence of a world outside of it. You cannot bear the creatures of the night because they are symbolic of your ignorance, evidence that there are realms of experience beyond the 'sight' that you are limited to. When something cannot be known it must be reviled.

Secretly you hate the scientists in their white coats of innocence and purity because they use insight into hidden realms to control magnets and laser beams and craft magical items upon which you rely. Scientists are wizards with elaborate degrees to protect them from your scrutiny and if you could you would burn all their textbooks and diagrams and machines and dance around the bonfire in ecstasy. Think about how ready people always are to burn books when given a chance. You would return to the world of ignorance and bloodshed if not for the elaborate fictions you have built. You use titles like doctor to single out the people you resent, to label them and define them, and they are convinced it is an honor. The reality is that all forms of distinction are modes of alienation that allow the distinguisher to have a measure of control over the distinguished. Dictators are pawns to the fears of the populace, they cannot manipulate what does not exist.

You wield your remote control like a lightsaber and pretend to understand how it works, by pressing the buttons you are given the most feeble and inaccurate sense of control possible and you force yourself to accept it as actual power. This prevents you from having the seemingly psychotic but totally sane desire to smash everything around you that has the semblance of life but was not made by your household brand of God. You pay extraordinary amounts of money to be granted access to thousands of channels that you can pause, fast forward, and record with your magic wand, lightsaber remote, powerstick, Excalibur, potentially alchemical and detached penis. They could have made those things round you know. At the end of a long day being told what to do you retreat into an easy chair with various adjustable controls — so that you have control — and force your will on a flashing box; the pleasure lies in the surfing and not the watching, the power and not the product. Yet you know that all of this is bullshit. You know that TV is only able to exist because of its ability to convince you to buy things that you don't really need. They have crafted into the remote control (lightsaber) five hundred ways for you to be lied to and your only complaint is that the lies are not convincing enough. You are eagerly anticipating the day that you will have holograms with olfactory ion beams in your living room. You want a solid light fiction that will have sex with you or hold you and will never tell a soul exactly how fucked up and insecure you really are. And you are. And so are they, the ambiguous and ambitious 'they' that apparently 'controls' the world. They build lightsabers not only as part of some dark and malevolent scheme but also because of the simple fact that they want lightsabers too! People that have power are by necessity people that want power, and the only reason to desire power is if you are keenly aware of how little you actually have and how little is actually possible to attain.

When was the last time you heard of a dictator that wasn't paranoid to an irrational degree. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin, Mugabe, Milosevic, Kim Sung Jung, Qaddafi, Khomeini, Noriega, Hussein, Castro, Fujimori, and Hitler, and the list goes on. Hitler was just looking for a lightsaber. And it does have to be a lightsaber. If light is the symbol for all knowledge that we pretend is absolute then what could be a better sign for power and wisdom than a giant penis that does not shoot off into the distance, as its nature demands, but hovers at arms length on the thrumming edge of climax. And those things do thrum don't they? It is almost as if they have accumulated a massive load of God gob just waiting to be ejaculated into the face of the unknown, the darkness, the Black Knight. Lucas was not creative enough to name the enemy of the 'light'saber anything other than Darth, which is of course Dark spoken with a swish lisp.

Life, as you have constructed it, is entirely built around the pretense of power or control. You are unwilling to receive any form of knowledge that denies you the fictions that must be believed in order to claim the slightest measure of control. Civilization was built on slavery. Democracy and philosophy in ancient Greece was only possible because none of the Greeks actually had to lift a finger. The USA was built the same way. Societies most concerned with a person's right to self-governance and control seem the most willing to enslave others, almost as if it is embedded within the character of freedom that one requires evidence of that freedom. By keeping close to hand large groups of people living in sharp contrast you can be assured of your own relative position.

We have developed innumerable devices to reinforce our perception of control. It isn't just lightsabers people, it is everything you own. This is not some Marxist Anti-Capitalist rant; Marx wasn't all wrong but he was desperately far from being all right. Capitalism is not the source of all our woes, it is simply the latest manifestation of those woes made flesh. We buy things as part of a concentrated campaign to define ourselves, to have control over ourselves. Our cellphones have individualized ringtones to make us attached to them, to make them seem more like something that we control. We wear fashionable clothes as a form of expression and never dwell too deeply on the fact that all we are really trying to do is lump ourselves into some category defined by someone else. I am established as anti-establishment, I am ahead of the curve, I am an iconoclast, I am a card carrying member of the Sierra Club, I like sex with boys, I like sex with boys and I am a boy, I don’t wanna grow up, I am ironic (seriously), I am a gurl, I am a hippy, a gangsta, a prep, I work with chemicals, I am not afraid of a little sweat, I carry firearms, don't fuck with me, I work for a living, I am a slut, a God-fearing Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, an atheist, an aesthete, I am smarter than you, I own Apple, I am part of the Technocracy, I am an amazing pair of tits, I am a giant penis (as clearly evidenced by my motorcycle), I can bench you, I am a Knicks fan, I love New York, I am with stupid (aren't I so fucking funny), I am in a band, I am made of money, I am punk rock (which means I am not made of money and fuck you), I am fun at parties, I hate black people, I am black people, I am Italian, French, Russian, Greek, Moroccan, I drink Coke, I am Prada, I just do it! I have in my closet five hundred other uniforms to wear just in case the scene changes and I want to be an 'individual' as part of some other predesignated collective. You believe you are making choices and yet you actively refuse to acknowledge that you have no control over the set of options. You are Pac-Man and you must gobble all the dots; you can eat the ghosts in any order or avoid them altogether but the one thing you know is that if they are not flashing then you lose if you touch them and if you lose then the game is over.

You are complicit with the very system that robs you of what little power you actually have in exchange for the illusion of a power that cannot in reality ever be attained. You are not only at the mercy of the system, you are the one that maintains it and presses it on others.

Control is limited to the parameters within which it is defined. Control is a fiction. You can only have control in one sense when you are constrained in another. Power, true power, is the ability to generate your own parameters, not being able to shift between two thousand channels at will but to determine whether channels are worth shifting between at all. Power comes in the form of a question. It is not to see a thing that has been determined but to determine what can be seen.