**New Fiction** Getting out of the System

“You might have heard ’Hello System,’ Raja Meziane’s 2019 Algerian song about alienation and popular disaffection with the ruling classes, the government and the president. The singer directs her complaints over a coin operated telephone to the deaf ears of “the system.” The phone scene has clear echoes of the Matrix movie (1999) which posits the system as a form of virtual reality. There are many systems, from the financial, to social and political systems. The combined set of all such systems is referred to as ‘the system.’ It may seem far too nebulous a term to be of much use, but I shall attempt to define it and also to explain why we might want to be out of the system before turning to practical advice and tips on how to get out of the system.”

“Over many years and in many places there have been structures in place, or a mesh of factors, which have tended to curb the development of our potential. Looking back to ancient times, it might seem more appropriate to call these structures nothing more or less than ‘culture.’ I am using the term ‘the system’ here because in modern societies there are new and labyrinthine dimensions to culture which have been built up in recent years with the proliferation of new technology, giving culture a more synthetic and less organic face. Any notion of ‘the system’ is bound to exaggerate its unified nature, but nevertheless there are certain trends repeated in completely different areas, and below for example I will discuss the case of privatization and the commons in medicine and agriculture in support of my argument. I shall be making the claim here that unconscious immersion in the system can be spiritually unhealthy, a bar to the growth of awareness and counter to the development of human potential. Can we realistically get out of the culture that nurtured and sustains us? Is the effort worthwhile or desirable anyway? I shall attempt to answer these questions throughout this work.”

“Living in an advanced society, with abundant and varied food, comfortable housing, education, medical care and safe transport, with much longer life-spans than our ancestors 200 years ago, we might well ask, what could possibly be wrong? From a strictly rationalist standpoint, the very idea that that something could be wrong with the above scenario tends to be viewed as an anti-rationalist attempt to undermine a belief in progress. It is doubtlessly right for a politician to constantly pontificate about policies on housing, education, medicine or transport, but the way these are constantly rehearsed in front of us by the media, supposedly to inform our democratic decisions, encourages us think and adopt political postures as if we were ourselves players in the media. But are we really players? We are consumers of a new reflexive media which gives us a voice but it also drowns us out. It is like the sports fan who shouts out instructions to “her” team as if she were the team’s manager. We become deluded into thinking we are bigger than we really are. When the reality of this delusion finally comes home, people swing towards a belief in conspiracy theories, which emphasize the power and concentrated intentions of those who are perceived to be behind the world’s changes. I call these tendencies a failure to get oneself into perspective. It is a tendency which is amplified, particularly among the young by social media, where media content about oneself is constantly created and displayed alongside the external media. The grandparents were long ago armchair participants in the puppet show of world events broadcast by the traditional media. Social media has simply exaggerated the trend, it is as if the sports fans have all been given mega microphones. People are drowning themselves out in a noise sea of blurred words and images.”

“The notion of getting out of a man made environment and being in nature must be enticing to anyone weary of noise, opinions and information, even if it is a 20 minute walk in the park to feel the sun and see sentient beings of other species, even domesticated ones.”

“Take that small impulse and magnify it a thousand times, dive naked into a pool of water and bathe in a waterfall beneath the hot sun. The water is cold and crystalline. See the rainbow halo effect created by the water particles rising into the air below the waterfall. This is relatively what getting out of the system might feel like, but wait!”

“Can you see the pattern? A tale of a world falling into chaos as a result of the greed of bankers and the violence of drugs and imperialism, all described in no more than 500 words with grim pictures of shanty towns, floods and falling bombs. By about page 5 you come to a sudden outbreak of alpine scenery with snow-capped mountains and an inevitable Bambi-like creature in the foreground with words promising an end to suffering. This has long been an evangelical pitch. This is the deal: believe in God and follow the right path (which we determine by the way). Be a good person and there will be an end to hunger and war. This message strikes a chord. There are many things wrong with the world, maybe it is true that we are part of that problem? Maybe if we believed in good, and fought for it, all the bad things would just seep away and eventually vanish.”

The lecture room was hot and stuffy. The professorial figure was jumping up and down with enthusiasm like a spider as she delivered her words, but I was beginning to drowse off, as much from boredom as heat. As the weight of my legs sliding forwards tilted my head upwards I stared out of a squat rectangular window, no more than one foot high and close to the ceiling. The leaves on the tree were swaying in the breeze. I suddenly I checked myself mid-snore and sat up to carry on listening as if nothing had happened. At least the talk seemed to get a bit juicier the moment I woke.

“Unfortunately the evangelical promise is just another piece of glossy programming on the shelf of the supermarket of life. What is the reality of the evangelical promise? You cannot generalize for all situations, it is not good or bad programming in itself, but it can be observed that there are people advocating a vision like that who discriminate against people of other religions, gays and ethnicities other than their own (typically non-whites). In some parts of the world, in Africa and South America there are cases of ‘Christians’ sponsoring hate of the people classed as ‘others’ and in extreme cases the killing of gays in the name of religion. Is there a place round the corner, out of sight in the Bambi scene, where violence towards homosexuals is appropriate? Look at the image of Bambi more closely. What about Bambi herself? Is she part of a real ecosystem or is she a mere standalone symbol of happiness for the Bible readers? A natural animal which is so close to human habitation that she gives the lie that humans are a peaceful lot, totally shielded from the nasty intra-human violence going on over sexual choice. Look then at Bambi under the microscope. She has ticks in her fur, draining her blood. This fact is not reflected at all in the human society, which is blissfully free of any vampirical elements. The image does not stack up.”

The leaves were getting cheesy. I blinked a couple of time and moved my head forward in an effort to focus. I was leaning back on an angled slab of rock chest deep in a pool of silky black water. Embroidered waves of white foam drifted gently past from the waterfall to my right. I watched mesmerized till I realized that I was not alone. Over to my left was a bare chested young man washing himself unselfconsciously in the water. “My” siren looked at me and slipped into the water revealing green scales below his waist followed by a fish tail. He reappeared in the middle of the heaviest section of the waterfall, looked at me and turned his back, seeming to write, though he clearly had no pen. But the words “get out” appeared in a dark script against the waterfall’s haze. I sat up jerkily and this time the middle aged lady to my right gave me a glare. I stood up and sidled past my neighbours to go to the bathroom. Was that my bladder calling me to leave the lecture room in a dream? I was momentarily embarrassed at the thought of being seen asleep in a public lecture, me a college lecturer who liked to come down hard on my students for such misdemeanours, but really who cares.

I opened the door to the bathroom and there was a girl washing her hands whose face was the female equivalent of the siren I had seen in my reverie and she winked and asked “did you just decide to get out of the system too?”