The Monkey's Lair
Lost Souls

       These days, life is simple. Go to school, learn to read a bit, write a bit, shake around beakers a bit. Get a job, earn lots of money, buy lots of expensive clothes, cars, decorations, colas, chocolate bars, pop music. Party a lot, find the perfect mate, have lots of wild, safe sex. So easy to be happy.

       So why, overall, can so few people do it? Some would say that happiness and love are all illusions; products of a media culture that is supported by industry and the nationalistic dream of the worlds largest gross domestic product. But is this really so? There are some problems with this theory: some people have found happiness, some people have found love. So how can they be illusions?

       Here is another theory for you to consider: they are not. The reason happiness and love are so rarely found is because people do not know how to find them. The first problem that arises in finding them is that most people are sheep. Although they claim to be more intelligent, both are herded without excessive effort by anyone who actually wants to, and both leave a mess of sheepshit in their wake. The general capacity for original thought is the same in both species. Both look down upon anyone leaving the flock. The second major problem is the shepherds. There are a lot of them, none of them actually know where the greenest grass is, and they all have shears. Poor sheep! Who to follow?

       Now my analogy comes to fruition. Look at something that you like, say clothing. Why do you like the clothes that you do? Did you like them 5 years ago? What made you change your mind? Chances are, if you actually did this, your answers were something like (in order) "Because they looks good," "No," and, "I grew up"/"I was crazy"/"I dont know." If these answers seem familiar, then I very well might now scare you out of reading the rest of this essay. You didn't like back then what you like now because you were told to. You changed your mind because you were told to. Those clothing chains are clever little buggers, aren't they?

       But why do they want to boss poor little sheep like us around? Well, consider the basic problem of their industry: to get a good name they have to make tough clothes. People are already bothered about having to pay $50-70 for a pair of jeans, and they want them to last. But making good jeans is much more expensive than just making jeans, so you have to sell a considerable number of them to turn a nice profit. But if everyone has these lovely jeans that last them five years, you'd need a huge population boom to sell new jeans to. Since that would cause a confrontation with the contraception industry, it really isnt a good idea. The other alternative is to change the popular style of jeans in nice long cycles so that people continually have to buy new jeans or fall behind the flock. Proper advertising convinces enough people that the flock will move without them that the flock does start to move, and everyone rushes so as not to be left out. Now you have a method of selling lot of jeans almost constantly. Good show!

       Now extend this tactic to pretty much every industry in the world. Clothing, automobiles, travel, real estate, music, perfumes, movies, chewing gum. This is the world. They all tell you what you want so that you go and buy it, and then they tell you that you want something else. They're really surprisingly good at it. They use sumbliminal messages, sexual attratction, and continual hammering of the senses to tell you what you want without you realizing it. The truly insidious thing about what they do is this: what ever they tell you that you need to be happy is almost certainly exactly the thing that you do not. The reason for this is greed: happy people dont spend much money.

       This is the point of reality cracking. Cracking is study and circumvention of software devices that help insure profit. Reality cracking is the exact same thing, but this time applied to the much larger forum of life. By freeing yourself of the psychological protection schemes implemented by those who wish solely to exploit your productivity, you allow yourself to find and pursue the things that you actually want. Perhaps the happiest sheep is the one who is his own shepherd.

       From now on, when you see a commercial depicting a bunch of attractive, popular people drinking Sprite, you should see that as an attempt to destroy your happiness. It is.


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