fantasy is a way for smart people to escape from the stupidity of conformism on the one hand and conscious moral corruption on the other hand. in that sense it's a superior paradigm, compared to the mundane reality of the productive society. it's goofy in how it hasn't discovered a way of bringing it's qualities to the real world, in contrast to the society of cultural creatives
i was a trekkie and later an otaku (anime fan, akira mostly) when i didn't see a possibility of bringing my spirit to the real world. i had just given up and i believed that there is no other way but living the total mind-split: playing along with society, on the lowest thus least corrupt level possible, to earn some money, then spend it all on fantasy. what a horribly sad perspective, but at least it kept my soul alive and saved me from total corruption until i found a better philosophy. my next philosophy was punk-rock. now that sounds like a weid progression. there seems to be nothing in it, and i certainly didn't care about alcohol. how is punk better than the richness of the idealistic trekkie world? but punkrock is just an excuse for total emancipation, which precedes authentic earthening of your own qualities. face the facts. there is no society to take you in like a starfleet academy, because this present society isn't ready and it only offers a training in corruption. so you have to face the hard reality of how you are alone, like a starfleet ensign who crushed on some shitty planet. then you have to come up with your own dreams, dreams that fit into this situation. you decide to become independent of consuming prepackaged dreams and that is freedom. but you are that punk-ensing of neverland.
it's interesting how star treck itself evolved along the same pattern. it started out as the cowboy land (the original series), an analogy of how smart people go through elementary school, then it became the big rational-conformistic family religion of the next generation, in analogy to a better than life high-school or college, then it became dirty and real as it began to split into the pluralism of deep space nine. shit just got real, as we were standing in front of our shadow (the third world) but we were still mostly confident about our identity, let aside some problems with rebels. then things got quite a little shaky in the head, in voyager and finally the independent existential punk psychosis of Farscape was unstoppable. you are the atman, the wormhole technology is hidden in your own head. of course not everyone was willing to go there yet. they reincarnated into the good old ways once more time: enterprise (2001) ... only to run into another existential psychosis immediately. wake up neo
