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Cloning the World

© Paul F. McDonald

Most of us have either seen or even been educated in one of those conventional classrooms that dominate grammar schools. It is the first bit of societal instruction young children receive, and as such, teaches them what sort of things their particular culture values.

At first glance, straightness really wins out. All the desks are arranged in straight rows. All the rulers are used for drawing straight lines in arithematic. All the letters written in penmanship must be painfully straight. The paper being written on is dominated by straight lines. If a pupil is given a pass to go to the restroom, they are told to go straight there and come straight back. If they misbehave and don't come straight back, rest assured a teacher will warn them that they better straighten up.

All this emphasis basically comes down to patterns of instruction that only focus on strictly linear thinking. Everything is broken up, given a name or a number, and that's the way it is. School systems as they stand now feature mass produced education that can only manufacture mass produced children, and the easiest way to get through both the teaching and the learning parts is to offer up a world ruled over by straight lines. The universe is seen not as a whole, but seen as it might look through lines on a net, which incidentally says a lot right there.

Much of this stems from valuing only one form of intelligence, namely the self-conscious human intellect. To put it simply, this intellect is not satisfied unless it is convinced that it's really running the universe - that without its logic and reason holding everything together, the world would fly apart through sheer centrifugal force. As I mentioned in my first article on the Living Force, any kind of self-conscious intellect has very little to do with nature. The universe grows and individuates itself with an organic intelligence which far surpasses that kind produced by neurons firing in the human brain.

But if all that is used to experience reality is the self-conscious perspective, then nature looks as if it is something that is in dire need of being straightened out.

This seems to be the founding philosophy of the Empire. It is best understood when related to its master, Palpatine, who plays the role of the discarnate, self-conscious monster ego ruling and regulating the galaxy. The Imperial Order has a positively militaristic attitude to life. When the universe is not seen as a process, it's seen as a thing, and things need to be used and dominated. In the Prequel Feminism articles, I mentioned the possibility that the end goal of the Empire is to control biological life completely. The beginnings of this scheme can be traced back to Attack of the Clones, where an army of clones is being secretly manufactured on the remote world of Kamino.

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