Man's Programming

"So why do you want to change your life?"
"I was thinking that I maybe one day I would be something, that I would be cool and be awesome and that everyone would respect me. It doesn't matter if I were good or bad or even downright evil, so long as people noticed me. Absolutely blending in I barely exist, it's as if I didn't matter. Unable to affect the world for good or for bad, I am static, insignificant and infinitesimal. Non-zero but not measurably by any means. If I would just do something big, I might get noticed, even for just a little while."
"What are you going to do?"
"Anything. Anything big, that would get noticed. I could commit a crime so great that I would be heralded as a monster, a demon in the flesh, a clock of flesh that steals the time of life. I could become a sacrifice, a burnt offering of blood and veins to appease the deity of publicity. I could do amazing good. Save the world! I could invent, create, sing, inspire. I could leave a legacy of truth and salvation. I could make the dead rise, the blind see, the deaf hear and the mute speak. Anything and everything is possible and I will do it all in a single day!"
"When will you do this?"
"Never. It is all impossible. All these things are true, and all things are false. Nothing I say is written, and nothing written is said. I reach into the depths of my conscience and I find anomalous dissonance of character, spite and programming. In the forge of my youth the hammer fell on my mind with my heart on the anvil and I was shaped! Shaped by hands of parents, peers, society, teachers, artists, poets, soldiers, philosophers, preachers, children, talkers, whisperers, shouters and politicians. Forged like an axe to cut, like a bow to shoot, rifled to twirl, a Caesar to conquer, an Alexander to be Great, a Madonna to be pictured."
"How did you become this way?"
"When a man goes to make a machine, he plans. He lists, and he extrapolates. He refines his vision until even others can see it clearly. Like the stars on a cloudless night, he envisions. And using the daemonaic languages of farce and brutality, he qualifies his wrath into quantified instruction. Instruction! An endless stream of specifics, detailing every case. No room for adjustment, no freedom, no sense of unreliability. This is the goal. No variation! No variance gives infinite power. Compiled by covert forces into the assembly language of man. The teachings, instructions and precepts that guide a boy into his life. That direct his steps and make him do everything single detailed and damned thing that he has been told to do. This is what I am. A machine running instructions. As specified by the manufacturer, with a warranty, a shelf life, a users manual and no variation!"
"But are you not master of your own destiny?"
"Oh course. That is part of my programming. I am programmed to make choices, to weigh up the options, to chose! But at every choice, I only do what I want. I do nothing else but that which I chose to do. I am constrained by my own preference, by my own desires. And where, great questioner, do my desires come, from?! Every answer to every question is cooped up inside my upper thinker and answers are retrieved from the programmed space and are loaded into my desires at precisely the right time. I have total freedom. I can chose without interference. But I will always do what I want. And what I want I have been programmed to want. I cannot want to want anything else, because I don't want to. I cannot want to do something besides my programming."
"What of rebellions?"
"All are nought. A sociopath is merely a robot that has been programmed with less than the greatest finesse. My childhood however, was one of decency and qualification. Of diligence and manhood, of morality and simplicity. I will not become a psycho because it is not in my veins. This is the catch: I could become a sociopathic killer, it would need to be gradual. But I won't. It's not that I couldn't or that I wouldn't think of it in an idle moment. It's that I absolutely can't due to a missing entry in the look up table of my manhood. My identity is in my work, in obsessive perfectionism that leads to creative works that spring from an imagination of dogs, demons, daughters and devices rich with mathematics and machines, problems that fall to my scrutiny and morals that would make any artist put away his misgivings about society."
"Then, are you a good man?"
"Yes, undoubtedly. But good is reserved for those who are under ultimate Grace and those who have been forgiven their sins of the trespasses of indecency and hatred. Sing a song of salvation, oh!, it is good to be free! But in all that, where is my concern that all of this is an illusion, that underneath humanity is a skin laid so bare that it is but matter! Matter makes a secular humanist of a soul leaving no tears and no laughter and only the stone cold singing of an arrow fletch with a shaft and a head buried deep in the once beating heart of a Christian! Evolution, and survival of the fittest. One idea supplants another and sadness is replaced with joy. Or at least madness is replaced with reason and the jovial emotions are left unscarred. But unlikely. Nihilism is where this all leads and nihilism is where it all ends."
"Then you are rejecting what you were programmed to do?"
"Impossibly so. But not so much rejecting, as confirming what it is all along. Many words leave meaning obscured and lack of decent forethought means that no change in views is possible. I am left with nothing, not even the great fortunes of life, money, freedom and education. I am left with jagged edges of a man I once knew as myself. I project myself onto imagined characters to hide the true intentions of my fiendish spell of letters. I am Iago and I will deceive my Othello self into killing me Desdemona demons and my Angela angels with swords of confusion and grace and dignity and lust and certainty and joy and vicious hatred and calm embarrassment. Vomit your programming because that is what you are programmed to do! Chase away the thoughts of vain predestination because you are flying free! Jump out of yourself because you want to and you want to want to and you want to want to want to want to. You can't do anything else, and nor can I because we are both alike in that manner. The concious mind isn't so, and the unconscious mind is so unpredictable. Alice never figured out the Mad Hatter but it didn't matter. I am through with my programming and I am through with myself."
"So there is a way out?"
"Yes and no. I can end the program. Step out of The Matrix, take the red pill and wake up in the real world. But the operating system might keep running the background, a higher order Matrix that completely contains the first. And N orders of Matrices which are multiplied on the left before it. I could accept it, move on and chase after money, success and women. I could try a third possibility and very likely go insane. Or I could waste everything on fruitless thinking that aches my brain and forces you to keep interrogating me."
"Then should we stop now and talk tomorrow?"
"A good idea. Then we shall never talk again."

Peter