Thread by @LarryDixonTGK

Ours was a highly-specialized society. It was built, decade upon decade, towards further refinement & specialization of what kind of citizen it would create. It was fine-tuned to make us what we are now. The variable, the ever-elusive-to-quantify-factor, is individual motive.
1/

This intensive norm, the baseline citizen, was hammered on by some, shaved away at by others, heat-treated by yet more. Who & what we were was machined into being. We were all made to fit tolerances, & when needed, a few shims were added, so we'd run through the machine well. 2/

The managers of the machine spent their lives within the machine; they thought they controlled the machine, but in truth they were the most subject to it. Those who feel command over the machine are the ones most integrated into it. Hints of that creates deep, horrible fear. 3/

While the machine thrummed messages in its many frequencies about freedom, its cogs were meshed ever tighter. Reinforcing bars were slid over the tourbillons until they were pointless, for the machine was refined to be more than steady: it was tuned to be immutable. 4/

The shims were prisons, punishments, dogma, laid on in whatever combination would providee the least amount of slop as the citizen was moved through the machine. Outliers were often turned into broken markers, simply masses of shims in the end, moans caught in the machine too. 5/

Those who could conceive a looser machine were oddities, but they ran through too after enough trim & shim was performed upon them. Those who fancied themselves in charge of the machine, most of all. They became functions; not even run through the machine after a time. 6/

They were integrated into it, imagining they had freedom, & that their status as a function meant they could define freedom for the rest of the stock put through the machine.
They pressed and shaved more citizens, unknowing they were as molded by the machine as they. 7/

The parts of the machine that thought they were powerful were the least powerful of all, hemmed in by the close tolerances of the machine that allowed them their semblance of life & freedom.
Nothing frightens or threatens a replacable part more than it knowing it's replacable. 8/

Inside the machine, its mechanisms were increasingly stressed. Its temperatures ran high as inevitable friction built up. Processing so much sameness to increasingly tighter tolerances made parts crack. Weaken. Melt. Fall off, fall away. 9/

Yet, as tensions cracked more parts of the machine wide open, the machine was unaware that the only ones who could repair it were the ones it had already modified to be identically acceptable for generations. The machine had forced out the elements required to repair it. 10/

Of course the machine was unaware; it had been created to be a machine. No one processed through the machine was capable of fixing it, because the machine did what it had been built to do. It did it very well. It was created for a purpose.
Its purpose can not save it. 11/

Yet, just as much as the citizens the machine churned out, all created with the same self-awareness the machine programmed into them with little variance, the machine was unable to program into these individuals one vital thing: motive.
The citizens had skills. /12

The citizens knew how to operate in the shapes the machine had made them, & occupy their particular slots.
But motives remained in the heart of the thoroughly-conditioned citizens, namely, the motives of how and why to use their skills. /13

Most citizens, as they were churned along by the machine, adopted its traits as if they were actually reasons; a tragic mistake, leading to failure of imagination & a dreadful sameness, regardless of the cheering & flag-waving they engaged in.
They stayed as they were made. /14

The machine that made them had to be right, after all. Right? It framed their every thought & experience, so if the machine was ever thought to be a failure, they themselves were a failure, for they came from the machine. It made sense. A fearful symmetry. /15

And so here we are, products of this nearly-unimaginably-complex manufacturing process, living automatons doing as we were raised, taught, & enforced, but the machine is eating itself.

And yet... /16

And yet... we still have motive. Despite our conditioning, our narrow ideas of what freedom is & what is fair or just, we have our skills.
What we can do with them is what the machine never quite got full control over.
The machine needed to leave us the concept of choice. /17

Without the concept of choice, a citizen will rail against the concept of being choiceless, creating collateral damage all the way.

Science fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote, "Freedom is a cage in which the bars are further than you wish to fly." /18

This is why so many in the machine think they are free. They can't conceive of not being as free as they've been trained to feel. Even while hemmed in, in every direction, they'll swear they're free.

The machine screams. /19

The machine thrashes, because it has done what it was built for: creating obedient citizens, but in working so diabolically well, it manufactured its own demise.
But we have our skills. What we do with THEM is what can save us all.
Think of what you know how to do. /20

Cheerleading? It is more than it appears. It uses physical motion, catchy phrases, fearlessness before crowds, & charm. Artist? It uses awareness of form & material, conveying complex meanings in a short amount of time.

Think widely. Encompass what your skills really mean. /21

Dance? Math? Biology? Comedy? These are single words for powerful skill sets. You are not powerless. You were built to be, by the machine, but you decide WHY you do what you do. That tells you what to do next--& when you work with others, synergy hits. It ignites. /22

This is the time in history when we join our skill sets together towards dismantling the dying machine & salvaging what was once good in there. With the right motives, we can tell what others need. The more we do it, the better we get at it.
/23

The better we get at it, the better it feels. Change & freedom are unsettlingl. We can't change that fact.
If you code, design, plan, organize, tally, build, imagine, however small you may feel amidst tragedies, you ARE dismantling the machine that made things this bad.

/end