There is No Spoon, or, Spoonlessness.

Like so many other techies, I was a huge fan of 'The Matrix' when it came out. It was sad to see the series degenerate so rapidly with each sequel, as the Wachowski Brothers apparently turned to Hallmark Greeting Cards for script writing, but I digress. The original, the slightly gritty, slightly sterile, bleeding-edge-hip original was a classic.

And a quote from that movie "There is No Spoon" has become a meme in our vernacular akin to a pop Doctrine of Maya (Life is but a dream). The really cool thing about this meme, though, is that it's true. There really is no spoon. There is simply a collection of atoms with very tight orbital patterns, aligned to a common frequency, and thus bound together in mutual affinity. If you added up the amount of space in between the nucleus and the electrons, there would actually be more empty space than matter.

Thus, if a solid object is mostly empty space, imagine just how ethereal a human-manufactured concept might be. An example of a concept like that would be Civilization. Another example would be Religion. And still a third example would be Politics. These aforementioned constructs only exist insofar as we allow them to. Outside the realm of semantics, they're just so much thin air. That is, you can't point to some quantifiable object and say: "There. That is religion." It is an idea -- a construct -- and is therefore unquantifiable in an objective, ontological sense.

I elaborate on this in order to provide a framework for the construct of Spoonlessness.

Spoonlessness is the idea that we are in control of the ideas or constructs we create, rather than vice-versa. It is the Master Key of Idea. Spoonlessness is a state of understanding wherein you can see the virtual 'atoms' at the core of the construct, and retain lucid control of the way they manifest. Spoonlessness states that a construct may be 'tweaked' in order to improve performance, or as a result of the emergence of other newly-discovered ideas or constructs.

Spoonlessness has only one law: There is no Spoon.

What this means, ultimately, is that we control the game, at least as far as our own ideas are concerned. And this is important and timely, because at the moment we're letting constructs on auto-pilot make our day-to-day lives miserable, and that's putting it mildly. Day-by-day we sink a bit deeper into the quagmire, and yet, highly-paid 'pundits' and infotainment bobble-heads continue to proclaim each decline as 'unexpected'.

Unexpected, only if you're not paying attention, for whatever reason that may be.

The Truth, however, is plain, transparent and simple: We are allowing outdated and corrupt constructs to run our day-to-day lives right into the ground. These institutions, initially noble, now decrepit, have become ubiquitous and infinitely intertwined with The Things that Matter, and I think it's high time we separate what does and does not matter.

What matters, for practical intents and purposes, is the individuals that make up the construct we call the Society of Man. All cultural pragmatism aside, humans need what all mammals need: A place to live, food to eat, and some type of extended family.

Why should these basic necessities be so difficult to achieve? It seems like such a simple task to reshape the spoon, as it were, and thus to create an open society where people are allowed to live out there lives, to eat, sleep and be merry, without fear of persecution from arcane, corrupt or just plain malicious constructs.

And the reality is this: It IS just that simple. Just remember: There is no spoon.

All we have to do in order to make things better is to decide we want to make things better.

Such is the way Spoonlessness rolls.