Pelevin's Empire V
Picked up Pelevin’s ‘Empire V’ and loved it. Best thing I’ve read lately — about money and enlightenment. How the illusion of reality works, using money as an example. I tried the movie, didn’t click, almost skipped the book because of it. The film ‘Generation P’ is brilliant, by the way.
The book came out in 2006. Bitcoin in 2008. Reads like a mix of “Monday Begins on Saturday” with “The Bitcoin Standard” and “The Psychology of Money,” only with vampires. The density of the text is unbelievable. Now I’ll have to read the sequel, “Batman Apollo.”
“How do I explain… Imagine a person sitting in a bare concrete cell, generating electricity. Let’s say he’s pushing iron levers back and forth, sticking out of the walls. He won’t last long, will he? He’ll start thinking — what am I doing here? Why am I yanking these handles from morning to night? Maybe I should climb out? He’ll start, don’t you think? — I suppose so, I agreed. — But if you hang a plasma screen in front of him and play a videotape with views of Venice, and you design the levers to look like the oars of a gondola gliding down a canal… And for a couple of weeks a year you turn the levers into ski poles and show Courchevel on the screen… The rower won’t have any questions left. Only the fear of losing his spot at the oars. So he’ll row with great enthusiasm.”
“You know what a cow thinks when she’s been milked by a machine her whole life? — he asked. — A cow doesn’t think. — No, she does. Just not the way people do. Not in abstract concepts, but in emotional reflexes. And on her level, she understands what’s happening very well. — How? — She thinks people are her children — freakish ones. Horrible. Unsuccessful. But still her own kids, whom she needs to feed, because otherwise they’ll starve. And so every day she chews clover and tries to give them as much milk as she can…”
“People are constantly chasing visions that arise in their heads. But for some reason, they chase them not inside the head where these visions appear, but through the real physical world onto which the visions are projected. And then, when the visions dissipate, a person stops and says — oh, mama, what was that? Where am I and why am I and what now? And this regularly happens not only to individuals but to entire civilizations. Living among illusions is as natural for a person as sitting in the grass is for a grasshopper. Because it’s precisely from human illusions that our bablos is produced…”