The Time Machine

Listen to this article

The intensity and speed is forcing us to consume into the void. The rational, critical, thinking is slowly taking a back seat.

A good reference to this, is, the Time Machine. A film about a scientist who invents a time machine that allows him to travel through time itself. Where in the film, he decides to travel 800,000 years ahead into the future.

The mad scientist, as described by his friends, note the word mad, as the madness can sometimes drive one into a sphere of brilliance. When one is labelled insane, sometimes it can clearly point to some truth or idea but so far into the future their thoughts may be, that no one can truly understand their ideas, and the rational describe them as crazy within the sphere of “now”.

Back to our film, our mad scientist travels into the future from 1910s.

Our current time

The scientist takes the time machine’s lever and pushes it into the future, stopping at August the 18th 1966. He starts to hear sirens around him, he gets out and looks around to see what is happening. He meets the son of one of his old friends, who he himself is in his late 60s now. They have a discussion about going underground because of the impending war.

Now, this is one of the signs we are already seeing in real life. War is pulling apart our countries and we’re heading at a fast rate into the destruction of our civilised world. Money, greed, and lack of abundance is driving us to hate each other and feel no empathy with what is happening around us. We keep ourselves sane by using the rat race as the perfect excuse for not doing anything unless it benefits us.

We fear it will be too late before we start to care to change things.

The age of destruction © George Pal Productions

The future time

When our scientist notices all the explosions around him, he rushes back to his time machine. He pushes his lever hard into the future and ends up in 802,701AD, where humankind has changed completely. Rid of all technology and ego. He meets a new race, Eloi, a society of elegant childlike adults. They live in small communities inside large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings – not working and only eating a raw vegan diet of fruits.

 

Raw vegan food © George Pal Productions

 

Now, are we crazy enough to say that some of this is already happening? There have been many cases of people, ridding themselves of the stresses of city life, to go live in small communities or live off the land with basic needs. This was highlighted in the TV series “Kevin McCloud’s Escape to the Wild”, where several families break away to live in remote areas, totally abandoning civilised life.

The idea of raw food is making its way into our world through documentaries and food bloggers – a good example is the documentary: Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead. Now, we’re not saying that these are bad – we ourselves live off a planet-based diet and we feel the benefits of not eating meat and dairy. But we’re saying that the comparison of where we are heading to, is very canny with the film’s future.

We are seeing the results of excessive economical growth damaging our minds, our bodies and the environment to try to literally push us into a different way of thinking. Whether that is good or bad, we don’t really know at the minute.

The film might lead most to think the idea of self destruction won’t reach our generation or generations of generations. However, what a great misconception. Our route clearly points to the era, where humanity loses control of thinking and embraces the idea of pure experience. Pure selfish experience. Watching that film is like peering into a crystal ball. We are seeing future evolve right in front of our eyes – a society that forces us to live without empathy. In the film, we see the Eloi have no idea of what is going on when a girl is about to drown. Ergo, no empathy.

Now, if we compare this to modern society. We clearly don’t want to help others who are in danger or need our help because we have made suing each other so easy and the laws of helping others so complex. We have become afraid of doing anything.

 

A girl drowning © George Pal Productions

 

There is another scene, where the scientist walk into their library to only find that the books crumble in his hands. The Eloi, have no idea what the books are and what to do with them. This points to a generation that don’t read and show no regard to the consequence of passing down knowledge.

In our case, our language is being trimmed down, words are becoming abbreviated and shorten to the level of three or four characters. The dictionary is always taking out words every year and adding useless nouns that have no right to be there. A lot of us are constantly glued to our phones and forgetting the world around us. Using social media to teach us to become IAMGOD – a world completely obsessed with their own self interests.

We love this quote used from Plato’s Phaedrus as it reminds us of the current google generation:
“This invention of yours will create a forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. …[your disciples] will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without its reality.”

No more knowledge © George Pal Productions

 

Acceptance

We are a species of extremism bond by polarisation. It helps soothe our trail of madness as we leap from one extreme to the next. Humankind seems to only want to embrace one ideal at a time while rejecting anything else. Science vs. Religion, White vs. Black, Vegan vs. Meat. We are at a constant struggle with finding balance in the void. It has never been found in our spectrum of life. And clearly that is the problem, not the rat race nor pure experience, but one that may sit deep inside the very fabric of our souls. Pushing us to fill that void but we may feel content if we embrace it instead.