Leviathan - Story Time
Before I get to the “story”, I’d like to say that it was inspired by a post on Kuro5hin.org a kind of moderated internet commune where this story was posted about the history of the American school system as written by a former New York Teacher Of The Year. You can find the text of the book on John Taylor Gatto’s site. Whoever submitted the story to Kuro5hin couldn’t fully relate the idea of Leviathan, so I helped him out. So, here we go…
Leviathan. A bubbling monstrosity that culls and drinks the souls of fair and strong. A gibbering horror which pulls the strings and laughs in cascades of haunting echoes none can hear. No poetic license is ascribed, no singular concept or conjecture envisioned, arises from a mind not addled by its will. Its claws and tentacles, teeth and talons, gaze and glare, grip the core and heart and mind with impossible strength born of intangibility.
No scheming, plotting beast dare seek the thing that manipulates the world. It uses all, discards and destroys the chaff, the useless, the insignificant, the insightful. Plundering and pillaging for want of control and persuasion, taste of fear, or succulent essence of the innocent. The babe born to the world is but a toy, a simulacrum to fill with breath, and ire, and pain. The machine churns on with each addition, gorging itself on faith, on hope, on love and hate and everything in between. Countless bulges, sinews and writhing appendages of every description reach out, and find purchase.
Invisible, omnipresent, and omniscient, it is not God, nor is it the devil. No demon or angel could possibly encompass the true horror that binds the path of life to a tumultuous and incongruous wasteland. The wreck of many heads and hideous wroth licks countless lips day and night, past and present. Atoms build cells, build life, build society, build the ruination of all. It lives, collective and incomprehensible, methodical and meticulous it forges toward a categorical imperative: domination.
Aware of the makings of itself, the cells must be managed, trained, and standardized. Aberrations removed with extreme prejudice, imprisoned, killed, or made irrelevant. No society, no religion, no politics or laws govern that which forges those very institutions. The economy of thought transcends a simple brain; no central core could manage such a beast. As each thing of value is more than that which composes its structure, the teeming mass of sentient life that contributes to the global network of shared ideas becomes a neural construct with an agenda beyond those who spin fanciful stories and pointless diatribes for public consumption.
Humanity itself is this shambling caricature of its own ideals. Each voice in the increasing din and cacophony enrages, calms, and defines a new life form which is uncaring for the plight of we who seek to find meaning in existence. There is no individuality that is not bounded, no enlightened epiphany untainted by the goals and desires of the totality of humanity. There is no escape but to be useless, a reject from the carefully outlined social and mental bounds of the world, a pariah to be pruned.
This is the Leviathan that haunts our dreams, both waking and sleeping, terrorizing those who fear death, who fear incompleteness, who fear anything beyond their understanding. The fretful power of impotent desires and futures reduces everything to simple cause and effect, right and wrong, black and white. The instrumentality of the incomplete human soul becomes this disembodied wraith, which is something less than God, but far more than his image.
This is the Leviathan, and as its roars of triumphant birth echo in our minds, we lose something of ourselves. This is the Leviathan, and that which can not be redefined, will be replaced.