HIERARCHY

Explorations of Augusto de Franco about THE MATRIX THAT REALLY EXISTS

HIERARCHY: Explorations of Augusto de Franco about THE MATRIX THAT REALLY EXISTS Augusto de Franco, 2012. Beta Version. English translation and revision: Leila Pas de Miranda and Joachim Lohkamp.

The digital version of this work was given to the Public Domain, edited with the seal of Escola-de-Redes as an unilateral decision of the author. Public Domain in this casemeans that this work, in relation to its digital version, is not copyright protected, unless the moral right of the author to be recognized for its creation. Total or partial reproductions are permitted, by any means, without prior permission. Thus, the digital version of this work may be - in their original or modied form - copied, printed, edited, published and distributed for prot (sold) or nonprot. It just can not be omitted from the authorship of the original version.
FRANCO, Augusto de Hierarchy: Explorations of Augusto de Franco about The Matrix That Really Exists/ Augusto de Franco. So Paulo: 2012. 94 p. A4 (Escola de Redes; 6) 1. Social Networks. 2. Organizations. 3. Escola de Redes. I. Title.

Escola-de-Redes is a network of people dedicated to research on social networks as well as to the creation and transfer of network weaving technologies. http://escoladeredes.net

SUMMARY
PRESENTATION | Suddenly you see the Matrix | 9 INTRODUCTION | Does the Matrix exist? | 17 PART 1 | How the Matrix is uploaded on you | 29
In the Family | 33 At School | 39 At Church | 53 In the social and political organizations | 61 In the Barracks | 67 At University | 73 At work | 77

PART 2 | Is it possible to exit the Matrix? | 85

To exit the Matrix | 91 Become a common person | 99

NOTES AND REFERENCES | 105

PRESENTATION

SUDDENLY YOU SEE THE MATRIX

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Suddenly your eyes are opened and what you see is: The Matrix. And then you see it everywhere: at home, at school, in the church, in the company, in business, in a football game, in trafc, in public services, in social media... To see the Matrix you just have to stop and observe the behaviour of private people. Do you need an example? Observe the cues at the banks. When that patient client of the bank arrives at the counter, after he was waiting like forever, he is going to take as much or even more time then the others before him. It is like he would say to you: Now it's my time to do what I want to do, so I will talk to the clerk a lot, I will inform myself about everything, taking advantage of my turn to do many different transactions... Now the others have to wait (like I had to wait.) Because now it's my turn. This is the typical behaviour of a private person (not common). But it is unbelievable how these persons that behave like this are not aware of it. You want another example? Observe carefully your facebook timeline or Twitter stream. You will see tons of friends or people that you follow speaking about the good, the beautiful and the true. You will see people writing about ethics, values, awareness, transformation of
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society... You will see people posting pictures of sweet kitties, dogs with ribbons, cute children with nice smiles, awesome landscapes... These people think (or, sometimes, they are not thinking at all because they are acting unconsciously) that by doing this they free themselves from their sins (and liberating themselves from the guilt of being not good enough). They are imagining (or even not imagining, but acting as they were imagining) that by building a public persona identied with the good, the beautiful and the true, they would be improving themselves (because they judge themselves as not good enough), repairing some defects that they supposedly carry within them: but from where? Ok, they don't know and the fact of not-knowing, but acting (in the psychoanalytic sense of the term) like this explains everything (although, for themselves, it does not explain anything because these people are not seeking explanations for what is as it should be). Even more interesting is that you will see that in social medias are tons of people celebrating fridays! And other crowds are liking and retweeting these enslaving manifestations. Automaticly. But from what do they really want to escape in the weekends? If you want to know, join a hierarchical organization. Anyone. And observe how people relate themselves to others within these
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strange environments, how they are not themselves... Yes, they are machines. During many decades I was observing this herd behaviour. Imagining, without to know how to excactly explain, that the hierarchie introduces deformations in the social eld that are capable of inducing people to replicate certain behaviours. So I began to explore in the space-time of these ows, to try to understand the structure and the dynamic that lies behind this matrix that produces replicants. Until suddenly, I saw an amazing thing. And what I saw was a non-human - a monster - depicted in the gure below:

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It was just then that I saw the Matrix. And when I saw it, I freaked out. The picture is terrifying. It reminds me of those ships of alien predators in Roland Emmerich's movie Independence Day (1996). Not by chance. Hierarchical organizations of humans generate non-human beings. But something prevents people from seeing it. That is why I decided to write this booklet. So Paulo, end of the winter 2012. Augusto de Franco

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INTRODUCTION

DOES THE MATRIX EXIST?

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THE TITLE ORIGINALLY PLANNED for this text was armative: "The Matrix Exists". I even opened a Facebook group, exactly called like that, to gather thoughts about the topic. But as the conversation rolled on within the group, I began to be assailed by growing doubts. As we all know, the idea of theMatrix came up with the Wachowski brothers' lm trilogy - The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003) - whose argument (the rst lm) was passably presented by distributors approximately like this: "in the near future, the young programmer Thomas Anderson, a hacker alias Neo, who lives in a dark cubicle, is plagued by strange nightmares, in which he is - against his will connected by cables in a huge computer system of the future. On all these occasions he wakes up screaming at the exact moment when the electrodes are to penetrate his brain. As the dream recurs, Anderson begins to have doubts about reality. Through the encounter with the mysterious Morpheus and Trinity, Thomas discovers that he is, like other people, victim of the Matrix, an articial intelligent system that manipulates the minds of people, creating the illusion of a real world while using their brains and individual bodies to produce energy. Morpheus is convinced that Thomas is the long awaited
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messiah capable of facing the Matrix and drive people back to reality and freedom." The central thesis of the lm - I mean not only the rst lm, but the complete trilogy (1999-2003) - was seen by some like this: "What we experience as reality is an articial virtual reality generated by the 'Matrix', the megacomputer coupled with our minds "(1). And, somehow, this was the vision that became widespread. But I had no such apprehension of the metaphor. What caught my attention was its social side, not the technological side, so to speak. Even because I thought (and still think) that every 'reality' is virtual, in a broad sense of the term. Moreover, the lm has also a conspiratorial story line. As if there were manipulative centers responsible for the massive alienation of people. Although, I do not think so. There is no Big Brother (human or non-human) that controls everything. I think the Matrix, if it exists, exists only because it is replicated by us continually (as I wrote in 2009, in the text "You are the enemy") (2). Working with the metaphor of the Matrix means for me to reject the hypothesis that there is a culprit, a universal enemy responsible for all evil that plagues us.

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Then I turned the name originally imagined into a question, placing it as the title of this introduction. The social thematic (or antisocial, as dened by Maturana) remains however. People keep reproducing very similar behaviors - that distort the social eld - as if under the inuence of the same system of beliefs, values, norms of behavior and patterns of organization, or as running a basic program that was installed on their minds and they think the world (or 'reality') is just like that. Now that evokes the metaphor of the lm The Matrix, where powerful machines with articial intelligence, control captivated humanity and people that just live their lives, monotonous or frenetic, in its modern human hives, without knowing it, taking what they see as reality. There is a parallel that gives meaning to a social grasp of the metaphor. In the Matrix that really exists, people do not see that their replicant behavior deforms the social eld. They think that the social world can only be interpreted through a set of basic beliefs of reference, by taking self-evident truths, axioms that do not require corroboration. Examples of these beliefs are that: The human being is inherently (or by nature) competitive.

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People are always making choices trying to maximize the satisfaction of their own material interests (egotistical). Without outstanding leaders it's not possible to mobilize and organize collective action. Nothing can work without a minimum of hierarchy.

These basic beliefs are like parameters of the program that was installed in people. So they do not realize that by acting on these assumptions (often undeclared, but always present), they reproduce the social reality that was deformed. In other words, they do not realize the distortion: because everyone knows that it is impossible to be different. These common beliefs that are not scientic at all (although justied on scientic verisimilitude) are running - as malware - on the social cloud we call mind. And they are so deeply installed downstairs - or anchored as preconceptions on the undergrounds of conscience (whatever this is) - that they may not even have perceived. In general people do not know that they are acting within the "event horizon" set for them. As in the known anecdote about that guy who "because he did not know that it was impossible, he went there and did it", people generally do not do anything different - which

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contradicts these basic prescriptions of functioning of the social world - because they know that is impossible. Evidently, we are here dealing with culture, i.e., nongenetic transmission of behaviors, a program that runs on the social network deforming the eld (3). A software that modies the hardware. A hardware that once modied, induces the replication of the software, i.e., automatically installs the program in the people that connects them to it. The culture that we are dealing with is one that has been replicated for millennia since the social network was verticalized with the erection of centralized institutions. Some call it patriarchal or warrior culture. Actually its emergence coincides with what we call civilization (word shrewdly translated by William Irwin Thompson translated as militarization) (4). But this is just the hierarchical culture. In a general sense the word hierarchy is applied to describe any arrangements of items (objects, names, values, categories) in which these items are represented as being "above", "below", or "on par" with the other. In mathematics the concept denotes an ordered set or a directed graph with no directed cycles
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(directed acyclic graph, abbreviated DAG - Directed acyclic graph). But this is diferent from the original sense. The term came to designate orders of midway beings between celestial and terrestrial bodies (and was used, for example, by Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite, in the 5th century, to describe the angelic choirs). The word comes from the Latin word hierarchy which, in turn, comes from the Greek word (hierarcha) of (hierarchs), who was in charge of chairing the sacred rites: = hiereus, priest, root = hieros , sacred + = arche, taking several related meanings such as power, government, order, principle (organizational). The hierarchy is a priestly vertical power that installs itself in a society articially, introducing the need of intermediation through separations (between upper and lower). In general it is represented by the pyramid (few in the top, many in the bottom) or the spider (which has a head and several arms or legs, as opposed to a star-sh, which has no central command and control). The celestial hierarchy (with its seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, powers, virtues, principalities, archangels and angels) and the military hierarchy (with generals, colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, sergeants,
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corporals and soldiers) are the most common examples, paradigmatic, of hierarchy. But any standard organization introducing anisotropies into the social eld and directing streams of ow is hierarchical (either in a state organization, business or social, religious or secular, military or civilian). The basic organizational structure of a government agency, a company or an entity of civil society illustrates the pattern of an hierarchical organization (the names of particular positions, roles, positions or patents do not matter):

The hierarchy is an organizational pattern that reproduces itself as a whole. It is a deformation on the social eld that affects all the events that occur in this
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eld because it conditions the interactive ow going through certain paths (and not others). From the viewpoint of social network topology, hierarchy is synonymous with centralization. There is power power in order to command the others - in the exact extent that there is centralization (i.e. hierarchy). To better understand this point of view it is necessary to examine Paul Baran's diagrams, published in the famous paper "On distributed communications" (1964) (5), to realize the differences between patterns: centralized, decentralized and distributed.

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In diagram (B) of the above gure we have the decentralized pattern that does not represent a topology without a center but, on the contrary, a multi-centered conguration. This pattern is nothing more than a hierarchy (corresponding to a hierarchical organization chart of any entity, such as the one depicted in the previous gure). The hierarchy is a centralizing intervention in the social network (or a deformation that makes the social eld more vertical) that allows you to delete nodes (disconnect or delete people), separate clusters (separate or remove shortcuts), and suppress paths (clog streams, lter or delete connections). Without doing any of these three things it is impossible to erect a hierarchy (or exert power over others, what is the same thing). In fully distributed networks there is no way to do anything. However, actually existing social networks are not generally fully distributed, but exhibit differing degrees of distribution (or, conversely, of centralization) (6). But without it - without centralization, without the possibility of exercising power over others - it is said (says the hierarchical culture), that nothing would work: people could not be educated, they would not learn to respect rules that ensure social coexistence and they
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would end in a war of all against all (because "the human beast would not be tamed"), companies would not evolve, we would not have developed philosophy, science, art, techniques, and nally ... progress. We would still be in the stone age. In the Matrix people believe it or behave as if they believe, which is the same thing. According to this point of view, therefore, the hierarchy is the Matrix that really exists. When you live in hierarchical systems you become, to some extent, an automaton and a Matrix replicant (a kind of unity borg) (7). Yes, in that sense something that strongly evokes the Matrix really exists. So better call the thing by its name. What follows are imaginative explorations in the Matrix that really exist, that are, free investigations into the hierarchy.

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PART 1

HOW THE MATRIX IS UPLOADED ON YOU

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IN THE MATRIX THAT REALLY EXISTS a standard program - the hierarchical program - is uploaded on you. This happens every time you connect to a hierarchical organization, or anything that is inuenced by a social eld deformed by a hierarchy. However, the hierarchical program is initially installed in people during their childhood and youth. In general, nowadays, this process should be completed by the age of 21, (deployment time is, therefore, from 7 to 8000 days). It is an obedience program. The goal is to restrict the degrees of freedom and discourage cooperation. Its most damaging consequence is killing creativity (or, in a more rigorous judgement, making the rise of what has been called to the human soul difcult).

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IN THE FAMILY

The infection begins in early childhood. The institution in charge of this rst task is family (the monogamous nuclear family, these days). Your task is: initialize the control program (we cannot forget that it already reveals what the Matrix is about - the Matrix is about control). Yes, it starts really early. Gerda Verden-Zller (1978 and 1982) was studying the root of the process by which the child is dehumanized by their parents. She unveils the controlling behavior in mother-child relationship, "when the mother, in interactions with their children, aims their future and uses it to educate and prepare them to achieve precisely the stated future. When this intentional dynamic settles in maternal-child relationship, the mother stops to see her children as specic individuals, and restricts her meetings with them to this condition. To the extent that such restriction occurs, a hug is not anymore a gesture of full acceptance of the specic children that is being hugged. It becomes a pressure with an intention. Similarly, the helping hand is no longer supporting the individual identity of the child, and becomes an external guide which negates this identity "(8).
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Seeing a child or baby as a future adult, parents do not accept them as they are at present time, but as what they should be in the future. Thus they transform the children into objects of an educational process. They do not really play with the kids because they do not see them as something that has value in itself (without any purpose other than the actual interaction in the present), but always, in some measure, as a preparation for the future. As a result, children do not see themselves as valid for who they are interacting with but only to the extent that they meet the expectations of parents, as they fulll the role that parents expect of them. They become dependent on approval (initially from the parents, and then from anyone who fullls the same function of control over them). They start to adopt a "top" approval instead of a horizontal recognition of their identity within a community. And that is why they have so many difculties to develop their social conscience (or, in a more rigorous judgment of generating the quality of soul that we call humanity). The mother and father, in most cases, do not play freely and unselshly with their children. They want to educate them. They want to shape them so they become "someone in life," they want them to become a copy of which they themselves were (or are) or a projected
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overshoot of what they are-not. In a kind of compensatory revenge they want their children to be able to be (or have) what they were (or have not). When this happens, the children cease to be what they are, they stop being children and become adults' projects, incomplete adults that need to be formatted so that they complete themselves according to the paternal projects. Here is the rst lesson embedded in the program: you cannot be what you are in your free interactions with others, but you have to become something different - you have to be xed, as if you had come with a defect from the factory - under the policies of others (the ones that are above you). If you do not act like this, you will not be accepted as a valid person. But there is a second lesson. The family privatizes social capital. The child learns to distrust when he hears his mother recommend: "Do not let your buddies break your toys, they are yours, not theirs." From an early age children are taught to separate what is "ours" from what is "others". They are taught to accept (or tolerate) each other in their living space, but with restrictions. They are taught that, somehow, those (others) are less legitimate. And since they are really young children are encouraged to stand out from the others (the children of other families), they are rewarded
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when they get higher grades, or when they do well (preferably better than their peers) in tests, when they win contests, competitions and tournaments and thy are warned (or at least not praised) when there are not the rst or excel somewhat. The reasons for this behaviorist pedagogy of rewards and punishments are never openly exposed. Because their drivers do not even know what they are doing. Or because it is not needed. Your children are more equal than the other children. This also does not need to be said: the child grasps it all just watching the recurrent behavior of parents. That treatment that we should dispense to friends, we reserve for "our blood". For them, yes, we do free things. Our friends, however, we treat all on the basis of reciprocity (as economists take the concept and deform it): I help you today, but you are in my debt and should help me later on. This, of course, is implicit, tacit knowledge that is rarely stated, but it is part of the handling code with strangers: yes, the others, who are not of my family, who do not have signicant portions of my DNA or who are not part of the closed circle of coexistence that was formed around my "crib" or are not "my". They are "theirs" (or someone else's) and it's you (or someone other than me) who must take care of them.

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This is how each of these cores we call family conforms a protection unit against interaction, a prevented detachment from the outside world (against the other, especially the unpredictable-other). So this is the second lesson embedded in the program: a separation, not a full acceptance of the "outsiders", the devaluation of others (which will no more be seen as another-myself) and the overvaluation of an inner circle, composed of "insiders" (and the adult produced this way will never again get rid of it: he will spend a lifetime trying to build or join private closed groups where "insiders" are worth more than "outsiders" and where the other is accepted only to the extent that it ceases to be himself to become a "we" organizational). But the program, in its basic full version, is really installed at school (acting as a church), and in some cases, at the church (acting as school), as we shall see in the following topics.

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AT SCHOOL

Well, then the child enters school and, as they say, escapes the frying pan to fall into the re. No wonder that children in general do not like going to school (except, sometimes to the so called pre-school, where they can play, that is, be what they are: children). And no wonder that, later, when they are young, will celebrate effusively to get off the school, as if they had regained freedom after serving a sentence (if the school was good for them, they would regret having to leave it, right?). Then the child enters - i.e., the child is compulsorily imprisoned by determination of the family and the state in an institution structured to protect you from freelearning, which until then - excluding the instrumental interventions made by parents - was going well. Thanks. But not now. Now the child will learn not what it really wants to learn, but what someone wants it to learn. It's called education. Quickly the child nds no use for complaining. Soon it realizes that resistance is futile: that is the rst lesson. As Bob Black (1985) wrote, now the child is in one of these
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"concentration camps to get in the habit of obedience and punctuality that are good qualities to a worker" (9). Yes, the child is being formatted to work for someone or, in exceptional cases, to serve and reproduce a system that would require someone to work for others. To do so, the children will receive an implant, a set of memetic parameters that will ensure that the program that is installed on them by the school will be able to run without problems. This special software that gets loaded into the child is the basic version of "program-slave" (or, in exceptional cases, the "program-enslaving": in fact the basic routines of both programs are the same). Unlike what is communicated, by entering the school the child did not go into an environment capable to give rise to or accelerate their learning, not even in an institution of knowledge transfer. Knowledge is there, of course, but it is only the legitimating excuse, the apparent product that justies the existence of the factory or the lubricant for the machine to run smoothly. So, anything will do the job, including maintaining the same curriculum in the 21st century that made sense in the Middle Ages. Because what is essential is that the program will be installed. That's why the child is there. At school.

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But to do that, the school needs to be a hetero-didact institution. The school needs to strongly discourage the self-learning (learning by yourself, seeking and inventing) and prohibit - or restrict the interaction to the point of making the alter-didacticism (to learn from each other, cocreating and sharing) impossible. If the school was not based on hetero-didacticism, it would have no reason to exist. The hetero-didacticism is realized through the fundamental separation of bodies that school based on: the separation between a teaching body and a student body. This separation leads to a subordination: the students are under-ordered in relation to teachers. Here is the rst subordination that the child experiences outside their family nest. Some other people - who do not belong to the child's family (its rst community) - will now be able to say what it should do, will be able to boss the child. And their parents are the guarantors of this subordination. Those same parents that were warned of strangers now - paradoxically for the child - will tell it that there is a kind of stranger that it should obey to: it's the teacher or professor. In order to smoothen this process, but extremely violent to the child psychologically, the teacher is often called "aunt" (to keep the link with family relationships that it already knows: it's just a way to trick
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the child sweetly) which is facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of the faculty in basic education is composed of women (yes, that's part of the system). Then the child is taught to obey. There is a shift. Obeying the parents is a preparation for obeying the teachers. To obey the bureaucrats of teaching (teachers) will be a preparation to obey the religious bureaucrats (priests, pastors, rabbis, imams...and others). Sometimes this process is concurrent, when the rst hetero-didact experience happens at school and simultaneously in some church (through catechesis), or if the school is religious, or if all is open and scandalous is the same (as in a madrassa). To obey the parents and teachers is a preparation to obey the chiefs in general (in future social organizations, the state or enterprises the child will join when it's young or grown up). The fact is that the child continues to seek legitimation for what it does from someone who is above, and out of its interaction with its peers. The school is organized as a cyst, separated from the community, protected from the interaction with the neighborhood by fences, walls, gates, locks (and often inside the school the doors are always locked, only the employee who carries the keys can open them, in the case that this is permitted by the guidelines
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of the establishment). There is no signicant interaction within this closed environment, commanded and controlled by a director, and the people in the community where the school is located. With rare exceptions (that prove the rule), parents and other relatives, neighbors and friends of the child, cannot interfere with the educational process to which the child is being subjected to. At school the child is accepted to the extent that it correctly responds to the expectations from the high; here, for the rst time, a top down order is being established through a bureaucracy. The school (or sometimes the church) is the child's rst experience of being possessed by a non-human entity (an incident that, despite all the problems mentioned above, has not occurred in the family). On entering one of these deformed social elds the child is violated by a hierarchy for the rst time. The main violation is a ban on playing. After entering the school the child can not play anymore, except in certain periods, under strict conditions and continuous surveillance. It's called recreation time and if the recreation is a form of distraction it means that during all the rest of the time the child is trapped in the school's
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work, duty, penalty, yoke. The recreation time reminds of the right of those prisoners to take a sunbath periodically. The Portuguese word for "school break or recreation time", is "recreio". In its origin, the word referred to the act of creating, producing something new. Recreating is how the child learns. But schools are not about learning, they are about teaching. Teaching is a forced and exhausting process. So "recreio" was given new meaning to express a kind of therapeutic refreshment, necessary to prevent or remedy diseases caused by education. The "educators" (i.e., the teachers) argue that at the preschool (early childhood education or what was called kindergarten) the child can play. The problem is that when you enter the school, the child is still a child, still in its infancy. Every primary school should remain a kindergarten and should be considered a learning period for children. But this would not be teaching. And then there would be no school! Another important violation is the prohibition imposed on a child to learn what it wants to learn. At school the child has no wishes. The child is subjected to a curriculum or a set of themes chosen by the bureaucracy of teaching (vertical or horizontal, it does not matter), which
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previously were imposed or acknowledged and endorsed by the State. The outcome is that the child does not learn in freedom: the child is compulsorily educated. And the learning problems that this violation of the fundamental freedom to learn entails is actually teaching problems (even the incorrectly called "learning disorders" are, for the most part, introduced by teaching disorders). If we quit the will to teach and let the child freely learn (what she wants to learn and not what we want it to learn), most of these disorders would simply disappear and it would be not necessary to pump children full with hard drugs (such as methylphenidate, commonly used today - and criminally) or dope them (with other substances that act structurally as amphetamines). The prohibition on free learning - because learning without being taught is subversive: it is a danger to the reproduction of institutionalized forms of management hierarchies of all sorts - it comes also with the banning of inventing. Essentially both are the same thing because learning is always an invention (while teaching is a reproduction). Then the child is discouraged to invent, to create, co-create, in short, discouraged to do the only thing able to leave it healthy while living in a disturbed social environment.

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The child will be accepted, included, validated and rewarded to the extent that it knows how to reproduce a given content or an expected cognitive behavior, not to the extent that it ventures to generate, individually or collectively, a new content or an unheard cognitive behavior. If the child is caught drawing during a grammar lesson, composing a song during a Science test or developing a game on his laptop during a physical education activity it will be warned. If several children are getting together to do any of these things it will be worse: the group will be punished, their parents will receive notications. Deviant behavior - from hetero-didacticism, especially when collective, can not go unpunished. The teachers take it as a personal offense. Educators in charge with guarding and punishing the kids do not realize that by doing so they are rooting out the creativity of those potential geniuses - and the real, yes, the real - of humanity. And they do not realize they are robots, replicating the Matrix. They are fullling their antisocial role: they are just murdering Mozart to run this strange human bending machine. As Saint-Exupery wrote (1939), "But there are no gardeners for people. An infant like Mozart is marked just like all the others by the stamping press... Mozart is doomed ... It is something like the human species, and not just the individual who is
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wounded, who are getting injured. What torments me is... that in each of these people, a bit of Mozart is being killed."(10). The installation of the program is complete with the teaching of competition. At school the child is discouraged to cooperate and encouraged to compete with her or his peers. This is hierarchical violation in its pure state, the main evil consequence of the centralizing deformation of the social eld and of the vertical direction the ows are forced to take. The hierarchy constrains the current to ow upward. To do well in life is to climb, climb the rungs of a ladder, to go from one school grade to the other getting the corresponding degree. For this purpose, the child has to be plucked from the tangle that she conforms with her or his peers. She must be individualized (or depersonalized by being disconnected from her/his network of friends) and to receive - always from above - the rewards due to his or her solo effort. The evaluations are individual and not about a group that cooperates (even if that may exist groups that cooperate). The student will be better evaluated on the extend that he/she stands out from the "others" rather than approaching them. The solidarity, mutual help and cooperation are not valuedand they are not part of the evaluation criteria adopted by the school. Each one looks
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after yourself. And the others be damned. This is how the child is taught (i.e., deformed) by the competition. In the competition, strictly speaking, anything goes (everything that the command-and-control system cannot prohibit, prevent or suppress). As for the competitive culture the most important thing is to take advantage, in school children learn to cheat. The main trick is to copy your colleague's tests. And copying should not be a trick at all, as it is an action that is actually a natural impulse to share. It just turns into cheating because there is a test (individual). If the challenges of learning were collective, the "copy" behavior would not only be lawful but desirable. Imitation (or cloning) is a phenomenology of interaction deeply associated with learning. We learn only when we clone, i.e., strictly speaking, we copy. That is the way it is with all living species. It is through cloning that termites can build their sophisticated mounds. And that the birds can y in ocks in such amazing formations (ocking) and the sh of the sea play those fantastic evolutions (shoaling). All self-propelled entities that interact imitate each other. Thus also humans.

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The child learns by imitating what it observes in its surroundings, initially cloning the behavior of parents and siblings, and then of the members of its extended social environment (other relatives, neighbors and friends). At school, the child will clone the behavior of teachers, but at this stage the child is already connected to a wider social network, but the child is strongly discouraged to clone the behavior of its colleagues. The social network of the school class is centered on the teacher just to guarantee that it is not going to turn into a distributed social network. This is the hierarchy! The hierarchy cannot, however, avoid the dysfunctions that its disturbance causes in the social eld. The basic sociability of humans is cooperative. Without cooperation we can not be humans (because language and talk themselves presuppose - and they are - cooperation). But when the environment favors competitive attitudes and discourages cooperative attitudes, it is inevitable that social and individual pathologies arise as dysfunctions. The dysfunction currently most evident is bullying. It is a disease of the environment and not of the people. Bullies can only have such a behavior when they are depersonalized by the system. They are symptoms of a collective disease that was contracted by the centralized
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network. The supposed need to control or dominate others would not manifest in individuals if they do not live in environments designed to control. It seems obvious that to end bullying in schools would be sufcient to close the schools. While this is not even considered, harassment will continue. And the bullying occurs in virtually all centralized environments or in all social elds deformed by hierarchy (in the workplace, neighborhood gangs, in military organizations etc). At the end of the seven to eight years of its ongoing transformation into an object of teaching, serving as raw material for the school factory, the service is almost accomplished. The child which was caught when it was six or seven years old was taught to conform itself to the restriction of its freedom (because resistance is futile). It was prevented from playing (because what counts is to engage in serious things that have a purpose and produce a result). It was discouraged to learn what it wants to learn, to invent, to create and co-create (because none of that is important, but one should know what was taught and reproduce the teachings received). And it was induced to compete (because cooperating is a delay in life and does not lead you anywhere). In fact the child is now dead - had his childhood mowed - and what
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rises in its place is a young formatted individual to obey (and to feel guilty and accuse others when she/he transgresses). It's done. The hierarchical program was successfully loaded in its basic version. Later the same school - or its vertical stretch, the university - will teach the young arguments to justify it all. In fact the child will learn to repeat a bunch of claims based on beliefs (ideological, not scientic) that humans are inherently (or naturally) competitive, that life is a struggle in which each one makes choices to maximize the satisfaction of their own interests, that only winners matter and that the winners are those who make (individually) the right choices and that nothing can operate without... hierarchy! But long before it learns to rationalize, the child who was infected at the school and received the slave-program, will reproduce the program through its everyday behavior. Each schooled will become a schooler (and later will convert all the organizations founded by them or in which they take part, in something like schools). That's how the hierarchical system - the Matrix that really exists reproduces itself.

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52

AT CHURCH

Not rarely, the church (and religion) acts on a child as school (making it a victim of teaching, during the so called catechesis). The religious intervention goes deeper, however. Its goal is to inculcate idea-implants, malicious memes (programs) able to make the child a replicator of hierarchical congurations (usually priests). This operation is done on a level of depth that no secular education could achieve. In church the child is taught that there is a single belief system fully correct and true (the one that it is receiving, of course, and therefore all others are wrong and false). Even when it is not clearly stated, it is implied: otherwise why would it be catechized in that religion and not in another? Or why would the child not be receiving an ecumenical initiation in all religious traditions? It is an experience of violation of the "human" to be inoculated with the perverse idea of denial of all other beliefs and invalidation of all other mystical conversations different from ours. The child alone would never reach such a conclusion, which is obviously stupid. That has to
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be printed onto the child, marked, as we brand cattle with a hot iron (11). The separation between faithful and unfaithful, the delegitimization of the indel as an equal and its denial, rejection and exclusion, was one of the most perverse things introduced by the religious hierarchy (and actually in a deeper sense, the whole hierarchy is religious, is always a sacred power, i.e., separate from the vulgar, the profane) in societies. This is not about spirituality and the mystical experience "in which a person lives itself as an integral component of a wider eld of relations of existence ... [and that] depends on the network of conversations in which it is immersed in and in which the person lives in who has that experience," as written by Humberto Maturana (1993) (12). This is related to the installation of that same slave program that the school exists to implant. The basic idea-implants vary with religious tradition, but are approximately the following, for millennia, at least since the "Indo-European" patriarchs (whatever it may have been) - as it seems, in civilizations derivative of the rst hierarchical formations of ancient Mesopotamia (or contaminated by them) - they have erected "a denial

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frontier of all the mystical conversations different from theirs": Firstly you have to internalize the idea that you are an inferior being and that there is a higher being, a superhuman, that you should fear, and to whom you must submit yourself (becoming a servant of this superior being: yes, this is exactly the word to be used here: "servant"). Secondly you have to believe that even if you do not do anything bad, you are wrong, simply because you are what you are: a human (imperfect, impure and bad) and not a superhuman (perfect and pure, the only being really good). In certain traditions that belief is reinforced by the perverse myth of original sin. Thirdly you have to give up trying to have an experience of direct contact (unmediated) with this supposed superhuman power. For the superhuman to being able to relate to human beings, intermediaries (priests) were established. And for you to be saved from the consequences of mistakes (sins) inherent in the human condition, a program has been built to protect you from interacting with this terrible power, and at the same time, include you in the list of the faithful, i.e., the ock of those
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who will be saved by him, if you provide the proper worship. This program is religion. Fourthly and lastly you have to obey the directives of the priests who constitute the church (teaching), outside of which there is no salvation. It seems like school - and it is school, really - because the relationship that founds the school remains: teachers and students are two separated bodies. Where there is religion there are always two churches: one that teaches - teachers (priests, pastors) and another that is taught students (the laity, the ock). But it is even more serious. The goal of this whole operation is to make the world priestly, I mean, to forge a social world that works only through mediation, and being sanctied from top to bottom. Attention: you are no longer in an isotropic social cosmos. There is someone above (or something terrible, with immeasurable power) that turned the ow vertical. This non-human power conferred special attributes to human intermediaries who, in turn, gained permission to reproduce themselves as a status group, investing other humans with the same private function of their condition and to anoint and consecrate environments, people and events (13).
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Humanity is not composed of the same if some are closer to (or receive more blessings from) that superhuman entity than others. There are now also Saints, Rishis, Mahatmas, and righteous people... that have a different status from ordinary people, sinners, and the unfair. Normal people are not just people, but kind of Saints that failed: if they are not Saints then this is a sign that they are not good enough. There is a foundation to distribute humans according to the rungs of a ladder, by its proximity to the supernatural hierarchy that permeates the human world (social). Even when nothing is said of it so crudely, it is implicit, that it comes along in the package. The most banal is (but not less cruel) that you'll be thinking that there are people that are more important than others, more important than you. Most people think that and behave bettingly with such belief, lling up of reverence to speak to a superior (not just a church hierarch, but any higher, I mean someone who has more power, more wealth, more diplomas or more fame than you). That's why we need just a leap to go from the religious world to the secular world. Powerful people, rich, full of titles and very famous will be seen, in this vertical social order, as superior. Bosses have some transcendent reason to occupy their

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position and must be nominated by their differential titles, obeyed, treated with some fear and often, with servility. A child who receives such a load of ideas (very unfavorable, let's face it, from the standpoint of freedom and cooperation) - even if it receives everything in a sweet way, through uplifting stories and oral and pastoral examples that exalt beauty, grace, the exuberance of nature created and invaded by divine love, as do the catechists - cannot recover easily. Something inside will be damaged for the rest of its life. But this is just the rst intervention of the church. In many cases the young and the adult will remain under its inuence receiving program updates, rst as laymen (or members of the ock, the student church). In other cases, in smaller numbers, the adult will enter the religious order that erected the teaching church, integrating his priestly bureaucracy and becoming a hierarch (a condition which he will hardly escape from unscathed after being ordained, i.e. after his ability to reproduce the vertical order of the Matrix was recognized by the hierarchy). The process will reach its climax when, beside the church and other organizations around confession or devotion (sects, religious associations, societies, sororities, fraternities), enter the scene of esoteric organizations
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(such as the really clandestine masonic society and the secret organizations of initiation, especially the militaryreligious orders that echo Templar traditions, through which the program will be installed in its hard version, so to say, in its professional version, for developers).

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60

IN THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS

The child is dead, and now it is time to continue the process of impregnating the already formatted young. This continues in school (and sometimes in church). But now new institutions show up, such as social and political organizations called "of youth", recreational clubs, or in some cases the gangs and criminal organizations (such as drug trafcking, which recruit even children), or socalled "social movements" (mainly the rigged by corporate organizations and political hierarchies, especially the high school student movement), civil society organizations of the new associationist bureaucracy of the NGOs (including corporations, foundations, etc.) and the so called service clubs. What is common to them all is that they are hierarchical organizations. They are kind of computer servers where the programs are ready to be downloaded and installed. Simply enter (connect yourself to) one of them and the download will start automatically. And the programs - the various versions of the same hierarchical program - are executable.

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A little later and it will be the turn of the barracks (when there is conscription to the armed forces); in some cases -depending on time and place - clandestine political organizations, said to be revolutionary (are in general structured in a highly centralized pattern, sometimes military), or in the so-called youth parties. All of those will act simultaneously (excluding child labor) with the work (as a trainee or as disqualied auxiliary of general services) in companies and other state or civil society bureaucratic organizations, exactly when they are turning from the rst youth (if one can say so) into young adulthood. "Youth" organizations are, in general, elds for initiation and training in autocratic and hierarchical methods and processes. Curiously, they are managed - overt or covertly - in large part, by non-youth. Policies for the youth are discussed in the central committees of gerontocratic organizations where elderly leaders gather and agree to recruit more and more young people to submit them to their supervisors or to frame them in their hierarchies. When they are right-wing political organizations, the youth organizations aim the inculcation of ideologies and training in methods of command and control. When they
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are left-wing, they aim the inculcation of ideologies and training in methods of command and control. The main difference is that in the former case, there is the assumption of maintaining order and the secular institutions (such as family, tradition and property and sometimes religion and 'race') and, in the second, the declared goal is to change the current order for another top-down order (also hierarchical, but with new actors exercising command and control). Another difference: the so-called left-wing trains young people in techniques of mass manipulation and conduction of assemblies, opening a participative space to do so (poorly interactive). In these "gather the herd" environments, which are always polarized by senior leaders, the youth will learn to be professionals in assemblies, to vote for every decision, to fake votes, to create and run campaigns, to defend some proposals, to attack and destroy opposing ones and sometimes, also learning to destroy the people that make such proposals, who will be considered as enemies. But all these organizations - leftwing or right-wing - are sidered by the imperative to train new leaders (who will replace the current hierarchs, also called leaders).

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A note on the role of parties, these hierarchical institutions in which people learn to privatize the public sphere. Parties are a special type of corporation to assert the interests of one group over the interests of other groups and individuals; based on (or taking as a pretext) a program, a set of ideas from which it is possible to gain and retain power to legitimate the exercise of command and control of others (being illegitimate from the social point of view, that is, from the point of view of distributed social networks). The rst parties were religious - they were the priestly castes who erected the state - and therefore parties are, in the origin, hierarchical organizations stricto sensu. Parties are a way to protect people from the experience of public politics. To achieve that - either as a monopoly (in dictatorships) or as an oligopoly (in formal democracies) - the parties privatize public politics. Their legal existence indicates that people, as just people, do not need to do public politics in their daily lives and at the base of society (in their communities): someone will make politics for them! Even in the democracies of the modern world it's assumed that people should not make public politics, unless you are a member of a party: a kind
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of state employment agency, a private organization authorized to compete with other private congeners organizations to have access to state institutions which are recognized legally as public and, therefore, exclusively are in charge of public policy. If we take off the liberal theories about the role of parties in democracy, what is left is more or less what was described above. Even if we make lots of effort trying to justify this unequal access to exercise public policy, it seems obvious that the party system privatizes politics. When you give to parties - excluvely - the power to transform politics in policy, people automatically become customers of the system. After entering a party - even if it is in its sector reserved for youth - the person begins to be deformed. He or she begins to feel that society is an area of dispute for hegemony and that politics is a kind of "art of war". It is, in short, to impose the will of a group on society, by all licit means (and, often, illicit). Youth who had its initiation in the political party life will have great difculties to get rid of the practice of instrumentalization of others on behalf of a cause (of a smaller group of people). They will often remain with the idea that the ends justify the means. They will learn to lie and use lies as a method; they will behave as members
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of a gang and even against their declared "values", they will justify - or at least omit or fail to report - corruption and other crimes when committed by 'ours'. To the extent that democracy is more the "metabolism" of a community of projects than the project of some interested in conducting a community somewhere according to their particular points of view or to satisfy their interests - a bold and crude denition of a political party - in these parties the young will learn, essentially, autocracy (and, what is more curious, he or she will do it incessantly reproducing speeches praising democracy).

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IN THE BARRACKS

During military service the hierarchy program is updated with the installation of a brute version, actually loutish. For the rst time the hierarchy is openly presented as a necessary principle to live (or survive) in the universal and eternal war that supposedly makes the world. According to the intrinsic cretinism in military ideology, war is a reality permanently present: it has existed since the foundation of human society and will exist for all time. Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war) is the main motto, which is written on the walls of the barracks. It should be obvious that if one prepares for war, the future will be war and not something else. Only at the cost of high doses of ideological loaded upon a normal person can assimilate this contradiction. Accepting it means admitting the assumption that human beings are, by nature, homo hostilis, i.e. inherently competitive and that, in the absence of a power above them to curb their primitive impulses, humans would destroy each other in a bellum omnium against omnes (a war of all against all), as written by the famous ideologist of State Thomas Hobbes (1651) (14).
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Now, to prepare for war requires hierarchy. In war you can not break, dilute, delay or mediate the vertical ow of command-execution. As, in times of peace, people have to prepare for war, then, even in the absence of any conict - which eventually justify the absolute control of the chiefs over their subordinates, as a matter of life or death - it is necessary to strictly observe and follow orderhierarchy-discipline-obedience. In other words, the whole issue becomes a matter of life or death. Here is the necrophiliac root of military ideology. In the barracks the young will experience, at rst, what is the command of one person over another (and the subjection of one person to another) in all its crudeness, without any justication or need for rational explanation: if you are the boss, you can send a recruit to do almost anything: wash the patio, carry furniture for removal of an ofcer, buy cigarettes at the corner bar, "pay" forty pushups ... This is deliberately encouraged to train subordinates in obedience. To support such an aberration, some additional scripts of the slave program Matrix will be inculcated in the recruits through aphorisms heavily laden with prejudices: "The top never fails, unless because of a sole responsibility fault of the subordinate"; "Only the one may give orders who learned obedience";
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"Collective indiscipline is a command error " etc..; besides an innity of other sayings of foul language, like "The barracks is the place where the child cries and the mother does not see," or "Military can not: are allowed to; do no rest: relax position; do not compliment: salutes"- all of them, however, with the aim of deploying the spirit of subjection to hierarchy and submission to bosses. Hierarchy in its raw state is revealed in the strongly centralized social network topology of the military organization. There, it is prohibited to multiply paths or take shortcuts that pass off (or bypass) the immediate supervisor (e.g., the lieutenant can not go straight to the colonel bypassing the captain and the major and violating the one path, skipping the compulsory stations of the course. This would be serious misconduct). All of that, of course, spills over to other civil and religious hierarchies. Some religious or religious-military orders lead the distribution of hierarchical positions to the extreme, justifying them by analogy with beyond merely human settings. In this case the perversity is greater, but there we are already in a programming environment - for developers.

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Last but not least, in the barracks the young will "learn" patriotism, a delusion with warmonger roots (the same one that accompanied the installation of the modern nation-State, this fruit of the war - in fact of the Peace of Westphalia. It is no coincidence that the military worship the imaginary community called nation, actually a domain of the State. The State reies the nation to justify itself as the autocratic apparatus that supposedly emanates from the nation. The military are one of the arms of the State (the armed wing), without which it would not have been possible to accomplish the erection of this organization constituted against others, against the enemies (and to be so it's enough just be another, it is not necessary to maintain any belligerent posture), against other states. The international system of perverse competitive equilibrium (which still could not be violated by democracy) is a pact between less than two hundred nation-states to centralize sociosferas where 7 billion people live. The patriotic fervor will be the fuel for the rulers to stay in power, to reproduce the system of (state) institutions that want to impose their legitimacy to society with the aim of making it their dominium (likewise feudal) and to continue producing enmity in the world. The culture of patriotic fervor allows the generation of an identity matrix, an
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identity based on war, state of war or preparation for war. The basic argument is the one of the real-politic (autocratic, not democratic): if we are not prepared for war, if we do not arm ourselves, we will be invaded and dominated by those who are prepared and have armed themselves (against us). It is a gang's argument. That is why patriotism is so important to the military. Without it, there is no way to recruit people to compose armed forces. Oaths, salute the ag, exaltation of nationalism, sacred duty, to die for the fatherland ... this is all hard drugs and part of the ideological charge the recruits get while being prepared, in most cases, not for a real war (hot or cold) against any true external enemy, but to maintain an internal state of war or to the preparation for war (paradoxically taken as a condition for peace) to justify vertical conformation of the social eld. To sum up, the young, in the barracks, barely out of high school or even just out of elementary school, are the victims of a rude intervention. Apparently, most of the compulsorily enlisted are able to recover from the trauma after completing their annual period of service. Those who decide to follow a military career, however, hardly will get rid of the impregnation. In every place they go, they will reproduce the matrix that was printed on them
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and that is composed of mythical, hierarchical and autocratic concepts of the eternal and universal war epic world: order, hierarchy, command, control, discipline, obedience, honor, duty, bravery , heroism ... They will educate their children with these "values". They will treat their collaborators, in civil projects that they engage in after they get out of the army or retire, as subordinates. They will require obedience, respect for authority and they will restrain freedom they deem excessive. The barracks are the environment where the Matrix that really exists strips down at a point that it appears, almost naively, as a caricature. This appearance is so crude that it is laughable, as can be seen by any intelligent person who observes the life in the barracks for sometime.

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AT UNIVERSITY

When approaching adulthood, some young - in growing numbers in most countries - enter the university, a meritocratic medieval corporation which remained in modernity and came to today under the monopoly of the award of degrees (since the alleged monopoly of knowledge, which it held eight centuries ago, was lost sometime in the recent past with the emergence of the network-society). At the university the young will basically learn meritocracy. The autocratic ideology they will receive is that those who know more have the right to direct those who know less. Even when it is not said openly - this autocratic Platonic principle that inspired academies around the world for more than two millennia - sounds like the natural thing to do. At the university, the youth will be taught that it's legitimate to erect epistemological courts, based on a supposed knowledge about knowledge, who will judge what is scientic (and should be accepted) and what is not (and must then be rejected). In some cases,
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especially in politics and sociology courses, the student will also be recruited to erect or be part of ideological barriers, which will allow the crossing of a few visions and prohibit the entry of others (considered contraband in the light of the dominant ideology in academia). At the university the young will join a corporation (perhaps the rst experience of corporation that the student will have in life, except, in some cases, the military, if recruited; but the former is more like a caste). The young will begin to see the world from the perspective of the corporation of the ones who "know" and will believe that such a view is somehow superior to the views of common people. It is also at the university that the young - who decide to continue in academic life - will get in touch initially with the idea of a career that is nothing else but a conditioned ow to climb positions of power, prestige and better pay in relation to the others, against the others or standing out from the others, instead of interacting and approaching them. In the dynamics of careers competition is strongly encouraged. Finally, at the university the young will receive the justications to defend and reproduce it all. It is there that
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the student will contact the scholarly explanations about social reality and its laws, through formulations that are largely non scientic, but compose the belief system of trendy inuential metaphysics accepted by their teachers - the priestly bureaucracy of knowledge. In short, at the university the young is still at school and everything that has been said about the school can be said, mutatis mutandis (and changing just a little bit), about the university. The priestly bureaucracy of knowledge (the hierarchy consists of teachers, postdocs, PhDs and masters) is actually a bureaucracy of teaching. Now, however, the young is in a meritocratic hierarchy that will give the student the security to pass judgment on the organization of the world, including the need to strengthen universal meritocracy and, inevitably, hierarchy. In some countries, like the United States, there is the tradition of college fraternities (named by combinations of Greek letters, such as Phi Alpha, Delta, Kappa, Beta, Omega etc..), that aim "to separate leaders from losers" (15). These fraternities - whose standard of organization, secret rituals and ideology were shamelessly copied from masonry and other esoteric organizations - play a greater role than is generally

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evaluated in training the youth as an installer of hierarchies, i.e., as an Matrix agent. When the young adult joins a company or any other state or social organization, this young academic will bring there the belief that the positions (especially the leadership) have to be associated with academic titles conferred by the university corporation. Somehow, continuing to reproduce the school in all of them.

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AT WORK

Well, then the young people come to the place where people celebrate Fridays and curse Mondays: the workplace! This should be enough to make them suspect that something is terribly wrong, but they do not take this eloquent sign into account (that about 70% of their lives is not being enjoyed according to their wishes). They nd it natural to pay tribute for six or ve days a week to be able to live as they want in one or two days left. When the young adult gets a rst job and goes to a workplace, whether in a company or other hierarchical organization responsible to a State or civil society, the slave-program that was installed is nally activated. Somehow, that was why he received such a long preparation. At work the contractor acknowledges that the slave-program is running well in the one who was hired (when no contractor has difculty making such recognition, it is called sometimes the "employability"). The slave-program is the password for the young to be admitted in the elds of the Matrix reproduction. All
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hierarchical organizations are elds of reproduction, but we are now focusing on those that replace the freedom of invention by the prison of labor (routine). Yes, workplaces are environments of reproduction, not of creation. They require discipline and obedience to allow that a process, a product or a service can be replicated with the fewest errors, in less time and at the lowest possible cost (and this has been called quality and productivity). For this purpose, companies and other general working organizations imprison the bodies of workers to enable leaders (administrators of people) to control them and command them closely. The assumption here is that the employee does not fulll its role voluntarily, but only if it is subjected to a system - feitorial or nearly feitorial (nowadays, taskmasters replaced the whip by the clock, the book of presence, the magnetic badge or the bank of hours) - in which someone watches the worker movements to avoid that he or she wastes time, loses concentration in the tasks and fails to "hit the targets" (decreasing the quality and productivity). Over 90% of employers imprison bodies. Heads of government ofces, business managers and "owners" of
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NGOs often imprison bodies. If people did not have to sleep and if it was allowed by the laws, they would like them to stay at their disposal full time: - 24 (hrs) X 7 (days): tum, tum, tum ... Even when they say the contrary, they do not want people to be entrepreneurs, creative, building innovative products or processes and performing wonderful things, but that they "work". They want: "work" = "repetition and execution of orders". If they wanted creation, innovation, they would not impose strange agendas to people (agendas that they had no opportunity to co-create), they would not tear time in controllable units, with rigid schedules of entry and exit in a walled space. They would give their employees (all of them) the best conditions for innovation (they would, maybe, rent a house on a paradise island, on a pleasant farm, or maybe at an urban forest, or with a garden, they would cultivate gardens ... in short, they would not organize or decorate their places - work places - in a so horrendous way, with no colors, art... all gray, like a prison or a convent) and, above all, they would not reduce your mobility: an essential dimension of people's freedom to create. The key to the captors of bodies is to keep their workers out of creative chaos, protect them from their own entrepreneurial spirit. So, to sterilize you, they put you in
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the pyramid. Or in a concentration camp: at the entrance of Auschwitz one could read (and still can, above the main gate), the words "Arbeit macht frei" (Work makes you free). The company (sensu lato) is a machine and the worker is not an operator but a part of the machine. The machine has to work to produce the processes, products and services for which it was designed and built. For the machine to work, the part has to work as a part, playing exactly the role for which it was designed. The hierarchical company was created to protect people from the experience of being an entrepreneur. To enter a company like that, people have to abandon their dreams for the sake of the dream of others. It is more or less as if the owner of the dream (or his servant or agent) was saying: "You do not need to be an entrepreneur but let me do it for you; since you, of course, give up your dream and adopt mine, working for me." At work (in a company or any other hierarchical organization) the young are taught to non-create, noninvent. They will soon learn that this could be bad for their career. It will make them uncomfortable to the chiefs: the young will be following paths that are not the ones they
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(the hierarchs) made (for them). The own colleagues will rebuke their initiatives, they will see it as a kind of disloyalty - as a bad habit of "showing service". New ideas to improve a management model, a process, a product or a service, will be judged in the midst of the worker ock as a desire to "show off" to the bosses. A ock of employees is more or less like those hordes of beings infected by some virus - very common in horror lms (or science ction B-movies) - who will chase and try to infect anyone who is not infected, yet. At work, the young man learns to be mediocre, to conform to a routine, to do things just like everyone else does, in exchange to the possibility, to enjoy life in the 30% of the time he has left, and he is going to see a match, or date somebody, or goes to the beach or to the movies, socializing with friends at a Sunday barbecue or at a bar, or he will try to do some sports or a follow his hobby, or to travel over the weekend ... In fact he will learn to bear the yoke, to suffer fatigue... daydreaming, dreaming of what he will do later, while making him believe that he is focused on what he is doing now. It is really a slaves' life, only acceptable for a person who was loaded with ... a slave program (16). In a hierarchical company the young will learn that he is not going to be paid for his work (or for what it is worth), but the
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willingness to be available to the managers or owners to do any work (they want them to do). Everything is organized so that the young does not realize that he is the entrepreneur, not the company. So he does not see that the company is a medium for him to do something, not a working camp (as if he is a slave?), a prison where he has to pay a penalty eight hours a day (as if he had been convicted of some crime), almost every day of the week (always bored and anxious, like the kids at school, always waiting for the time that the bell rings), or an idol that he should adore. If the young cannot see, then it is a sign that the impregnation process is completed, the program has successfully loaded, it is fully installed and running well. The young man is now fully integrated into the Matrix and can now be considered a responsible adult. Family, school, church, youth organizations, parties, barracks, university, business and other work organizations (state or social) - all these institutions load the program, update the program (or one of its different versions). It is nearly impossible to escape them all. And what is common to them all, or apparently so different, with many differing or even opposite goals? What is
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common is the hierarchy, the more centralized than distributed pattern of organization, with all that it implies: the management model based on command-and-control, the existence of leadership of one person, the requirement of obedience (or sub-ordering). Restricting freedom and discouraging cooperation seems to be the goal. People in the Matrix will react to all this saying: "- But could it be any other way? If we do not organize people in hierarchical systems they would still be in the stone age, living in groups, wandering, busy to survive and their life would be - as Hobbes wrote (1651) - 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' ? "(17). These objections are, obviously, suggested by the hierarchical program installed in them. But telling them they are people that are just giving a voice to a typical being, the standard individuals of the Matrix that really exists are being converted into private individuals, as discussed below.

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PART 2

IS IT POSSIBLE TO GET OUT OF THE MATRIX?

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BEFORE ANYTHING we need to know what it means to get out of the Matrix. The Matrix that really exists is not an external reality to the tangles that we are in (and where we are - as we are, we, the humans). It is a social eld deformed by hierarchy. It is in the middle of us in a double sense: it is among us (we weave relationships with others) and it is also within us (because we introject or mirror the social tangle settings in which we exist as persons). To stop to reproduce these (hierarchical) settings in our relations with the others is the rst step to break free of the Matrix. This seems to be the decisive step to start to clear the deformations and not the opposite, as is often believed. There is a widespread belief - with a hierarchical background - according to which rst the person has to have an inner transformation (as an individual) and then change the (social) settings in which he or she is immersed in. However, it seems, the change of visions, conceptions and ideas do not change behavior: only behaviors change behavior. The Matrix is not reproduced because of our beliefs, convictions and values, but rather because of our behavior, because of the way we relate to others. If we do not obey (someone) and do not demand obedience (from anyone) there would be no hierarchy. It would be enough, in essence, to give
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up bossing others, i.e., to command them and control them. As simple as that. To boss people and to obey people, however, is not to desire to do this, but to act so as to effectively perform the command and obedience. Nobody can do it if you cannot select ows, eliminating nodes, connections or shortcuts in the social network. Nobody can do this alone. One must have a centralized network of people to erect a hierarchy (in fact, the hierarchy is already the centralization of the network). To exit the Matrix a person needs to change the topology of the social networks she or he is connected to, towards more distribution (or less centralization). It's not enough, although, just to have a desire to do this or just speak or write about it. It is necessary to change the network settings. It's not a question of just a new software, it's a new hardware what matters. Escaping the Matrix is like building a refuge, a shelter protected from the inuence of the social eld deformed by the hierarchy (or by the more centralized than distributed network topology). This result will be temporary - huts or shelters are like bubbles - and thus the effort to escape should be intermittent. Sooner or later the inuence of the hierarchical environment will
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burst the bubble. And another bubble should then be opened (18). The bubbles (huts or shelters from the inuence of the Matrix) are just more distributed than centralized networks. The more distributed the network, the less it will suffer from the inuence of the Matrix, which is just another way of saying - the obvious - that there will be less centralization (or less hierarchy in the environmental setup). To exit the Matrix you have to hack the institutions that put you into the Matrix (i.e., who installed the program in you): family, school, church, hierarchical organizations (including entities of the civil society, corporations and political parties), the barracks, universities and business, governmental and social organizations that employ persons for compensation or that are agents of their work. However, although necessary, this is not enough. It's not enough just to cut (to hack) or break (to crack) the code of these institutions (and deprogramming them): you have to reprogram them, or better, program what they would be without hierarchy (and this is not just hacking, it's more of netweaving), not only generically, but for you
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and for the tangle where you are glocally inserted. For that, you need to become a common person. In the movie The Matrix, Neo (Thomas Anderson) is a hacker. But a hacker is still an uncommon person and, as such, can not get out of the Matrix. A hacker is a different person, a kind of "digital Zionist," a member of a "thirteenth tribe", an elite whose members are able to recognize themselves based on their differential attributes, i.e., from what they stand out from the others (rather than the ones that approximate them) (19). Neo is a hacker while it would be necessary for him to be a netweaver to exit the Matrix. And then he would not be the chosen one. He would be a common person, chosen together with all who are in the same tangle, when this cluster got caught by the ow (i.e., when the conguration of the cloud of connections that surrounds it becomes more distributed than centralized). All of us are chosen when caught by the ow. Exiting the Matrix is abandoning yourself into the interactive ow, let it invade the worlds that we set in our living, pierce the walls that we erect "against the winds, the tides and the stars" ... (20).

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TO EXIT THE MATRIX

To exit the Matrix you need to be un-taught. There is no other way. You're in the Matrix because you were taught, i.e. programmed. Now you need to be deprogrammed. Not enough, however. You also need to be reprogrammed. Both, deprogramming and reprogramming should be done by you and the other people who interact with you in your tangle. But deprogramming and reprogramming are not teaching, but free and common learning. All autodidact learning or learning with your peers gets the teaching out of you. The key out of the hierarchy is unlearning. Unlearning hierarchy, yes, but the word 'unlearning' is used here in a opposite direction to the heterodidatic learning, it means, when you learn not what you want to learn but what someone else wants you to learn (i.e., teaching). In this sense, to unlearn hierarchy is learning to disobey (or unlearn to command, which is the same thing). In the Matrix that really exists, teaching obedience is a constant. It begins in the family, is deepened in school, is based with transcendent reasons in the church, gets
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instrumentalised in the social and political organizations, is exacerbated in the barracks, becomes rational in the university and is consolidated in the workplace. To deprogram the part of the program (its deepest layer) that you received in the family, it is necessary to stop to replicate family everywhere, resisting the temptation of belonging (or forming) an owner or closed group (21), stopping to make projections of your parents in the chiefs and authorities in general (22) and - most important relearning how to play (23). But reprogramming will only become real when you begin to live in a network (distributed) or live in the community (open) with your friends (regardless of the degree of relationship they have with you), with no other purpose than to delight in the enjoyment of living with them. To deprogram the schooling that you were a victim of, one must give up teaching others. This is harder than it sounds because it is not only a question of avoiding to be a teacher (which most people are not), but avoiding to reproduce the teaching behavior, in all its forms. Give up the will to lead others or convince others - even with the pretext of facilitating their learning process and to give opportunities for them "to be included" (where?) requires constant attention. Reprogramming will come
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when you begin to act as a catalyst for learning processes in free communities of seekers and pollinators, structured as distributed networks. To break the script that you may have received in the church, you have to give up to meet exclusively in clusters of those who profess the same faith (or belief) and believe that there is a (unique) way to truth (24). It is not necessary that you abandon your spirituality or your mystical life, not even your god (since you do not want to impose it on others, separating believers from unbelievers). This process is not complete while you are building (or joining) the priestly orders who proclaim themselves the only way, the only door, the only hope of salvation, i.e., while you re-edit (or belong to) any of these ow traps constructed for herd sheep to feed them (called churches) (25). Reprogramming will come when you - if applicable and if you want to do this - start sharing post-religious forms of spirituality with others in new Ecclesias (as "lovers assemblies"), such as networks of seekers who are willing to celebrate their love and pollinate each other and the ways they live their spirituality or mysticism. To deprogram what you received in the social and political organizations, you have to let go of the conservative mind - "conservadorismo" - (which wants to
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freeze and reproduce preterit settings resisting the interactive ow) and also the transformer mind "transformacionismo" - (who wants to convert people into what they are not, to lead them into a radiant future that would be installed with the transformation of society in what it is not, by performing some authoritarian utopia able to install a new order) (26). Therefore, it would be sufcient to adhere to democracy, but as this word is not taken in the original sense of deconstitution of autocracy but often confused with a governance model or a political form of the state administration, to just use the term (without adjectives) would lead to a confusion with the representative or electoral system - not helping to make it understandable. Reprogramming will come when you - giving up the regressive notions of patriotism and nationalism, and becoming a citizen of your transnational glocality - begin to relate to networks of social and political interaction (public) in neighborhoods and areas of activity within communities that exercise cooperative democracy at the base of society and at the daily lives of people (who coexist with you) (27). To deprogram what you eventually received in the barracks or military organizations in general (including the political-military organizations, as certain political
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parties; or religious-military, as some churches, sects and orders), you have to renounce war and the construction of enemies. Enemies are created by ghting someone. But there is not a good ght, there is not a good struggle, there is not just a war of good against evil. Just as the righteous king legitimates autocracies, the "warrior of light", involved in an ongoing ght against the "Warrior of Darkness", legitimizes the existence of war (and, hence, the employment and manufacturing of the gun). The war (or politics practiced as the art of war) is, in itself, the evil. The only enemy that exists is the creator of enemies. If you ght, you will be the enemy. Reprogramming will come when you do not ght. If you do not ght, there is no ght at all. To deprogram what you received in college you have to renounce meritocracy, giving up to erect (or validate) epistemological courts able to approve (or disapprove) people based on heterodidatic checks of knowledge that was "taught". Reprogramming will come when you begin to assess the tree by its fruits, not by certicates issued by some botanical corporation (28). To deprogram what you received in companies and other workplaces, you have to learn to collaborate (work with others), or, in other words, to unlearn to work for others
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and putting other people to work for you. Reprogramming will happen when you become an interdependent entrepreneur, i.e. a co-entrepreneur, a co-creator of ideas and a co-maker of projects in shared ventures (29). Learn to disobey (or unlearn how to boss people); resist the temptation of belonging to a group, stop transferring and projecting the images of our parents in bosses and authorities and relearn how to play; catalyze free learning processes; horizontally share your spirituality and celebrate what you love; exercise cooperative democracy and avoid to create enemies; evaluate the trees by their fruits delegitimizing the epistemological courts, and creating and making things together. It seems difcult, but nobody ever said it was easy. However, it is not necessary to do all these things at once. The hierarchical program you are hacking is the same in all these traps of ows whether it is in the family, the school, the church, at social and political organizations, the barracks, the university, or the companies and other hierarchical work institutions. To change the code from one of these institutions is enough to change the programming of societies of control. You can choose where you want to start. But to start is not to nish. To

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reprogram glocal social spheres it is not enough to hack, you must also do net weaving. In short, all this can be summed up in one word: networking. Networks should be seen in this sense as hierarchical deconstruction movements and as environments of formation of other worlds, protected - at least temporarily - from the inuence of the Matrix that really exists. It would be an impossible task for an individual. But you are not an individual as the Matrix wants you to believe (because the Matrix is a factory of individuals). It is necessary to abandon the illusion that you are an individual and become a person. A common person.

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BECOME A COMMON PERSON

When a person relates to others in a more distributed than centralized network, she or he learns to become a common person. But in the Matrix that really exists people, in general, are not common people (in the sense of commons), but private individuals (closed in the interaction with the unpredictable other). The Matrix is a kind of factory of private persons. Private persons could turn into common persons if they wouldn't want to be unusual people. But immersed in a vertical current that drags everything up, people want to be unusual (and behave bettingly with such a desire). So they isolate themselves from interaction and then can no longer be common persons. Yes, a common person. This is perhaps the most difcult concept to grasp because of its disconcerting simplicity. It arose from the observation that, in hierarchical structures, we are not ordinary people, as we strive to be unusual people and stand out from the similar ones (rather than to approach them).
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The term 'common' has here the sense of commons, the common good, something to be shared by a community (not ordinary, normal or remarkable, nor mediocre, as is generally attributed pejoratively). Thus, a common person is one who keeps the same conditions of other people sharing their tangle, although each is, in its particulars, totally different, and always unique. The common person is the one who shares (she is really what she shares, letting themselves to be swept by the breath, permeable to the interactive ow) and not one that achieved success because of their inherited characteristics (the "blood" or "cradle"), or the characteristics acquired by the efforts they made to get ahead or to progress or to evolve in her spiritual path. The common person is someone who managed to coexist, the one that could anticipate the fullness of living together or living in a social network preguring a social symbiote. Common persons are not failed saints or heroes. Rather, saints and heroes fail to be common persons (30). Saints and heroes are unusual people, results from the escapades of humanity, attempts to individual transformation outside the interactive ow and are, in that sense, humans eeing the interaction and not the
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opposite, as the hierarchical culture tried to inculcate, according to which common persons are not good enough, as if they were failed saints or heroes or just losers (losers, as the American culture likes to tell, associating success with virtue) - because they could not win accumulating wealth, power or many titles. The same can be said about the so-called celebrities, which, from a collective or network point of view, are symptoms of a pathology of interaction (31). When asked, people who believe in that sort of things and there are many - often say that life is like that. It's a ght. And we need that to succeed in life. But who wins? Are we really in a war? The problem is that we are. The Matrix exists only because people behave as if they were in a war. You can exit the Matrix, yes, but it's hard. Because it is not easy to be a common person, in contrary to what it seems. In the Matrix we are induced to gain some advantage and stand out from ordinary people. When we interact with someone in any hierarchical environment we are evaluated by these differences and then we began to cultivate them. As a reection of the vertical ows which we start to value, our life also turns vertical. It's like we absorb the anisotropy generated in the social eld by the
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hierarchy. In our rush to climb, we began to imitate the persons at the top and despise the ones at the bottom. In doing so, however, we replicate the Matrix. James Joyce (1902) was right when writing in a letter to Augusta Gregory, that "there is no heresy or philosophy that bother the church more than a human being" (32). The church is an example of how the Matrix really became into existence. There is nothing more dangerous to the Matrix than a common person. It is more dangerous, innitely more dangerous than a saint or a hero. This is the reason for the religious discourse of devaluation of the common person in favor of unusual people (like the saints and those who received the anointing through the intermediation of the hierarchy: the priests that were holy as full faculty members through the operation of rituals practiced by other priests of the same hierarchical status: metastasis). To examine the behavior of private individuals is a way to reveal the Matrix that really exists. They want to be powerful, rich, very titled, famous. In general, they are nothing like this, but they behave according to the illusion (undeclared, often unconscious) that they could be. Actually there is a desire to imitate the powerful people, rich, titled or very famous. Then they close themselves
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from interaction, being selective in relationships (which from the point of view of the network - is the failure of all the so called "successful people") (33). If you want to "be successful", go ahead. But be aware that success is an indicator of adaptation to the Matrix that really exists. But if you do not want to adapt to the Matrix, if you want to be a revolutionary or a reformer of institutions, if you want to save the family, improve the school, reform the church, modernized the hierarchical company, change state democratic institutions making them more participatory, you can be in peace. Enjoy with Cypher (34) that juicy virtual steak. And forget that you will continue in the Matrix. It will be easier to bear.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

(1) Cf. ZIZEK, Slajov (2002). Matrix: ou os dois lados da perverso, in IRWIN, William org. (2002). Matrix: Bem-vindo ao deserto do real. So Paulo: Madras, 2003. (2) Cf. FRANCO, Augusto (2009). Voc o inimigo. Available at http://www.slideshare.net/ augustodefranco/voc-o-inimigo-3900733 (3) The idea of a social eld - like a force eld (means by which a force communicates its inuence) - was suggested in 2007 and published in the book Novas Vises (2008), to describe the effect of the social network topology on people (such as in a physical eld it is possible to determine the intensity and direction of the force at each point). In a distributed topology, the social eld would keep the same properties in all directions. A centralized topology introduces an anisotropy (favoring certain directions or conditioning the ow to pass through them to the detriment of other possible directions). This anisotropy - introduced by the hierarchy (i.e., by the
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centralization) - is then seen as a deformation in the social eld. In general it is described as a eld forced to be vertical (privileging the vertical direction or paths of ascent and descent). In the presence of hierarchical organizations, the social eld suffers a deformation, not only inside of it, but also in its surroundings. The concept (or picture) has no analytical purposes, but intends to demonstrate something (or illustrate): people in a deformed social eld tend to behave in a manner consistent with the available paths, regardless of their individual characteristics: for example, in a vertical eld, one tends to privilege the vertical direction, disputing with others the possible paths of ascension (competition), instead of establishing horizontal relations with them (collaboration). This view is consistent with the hypothesis that collaboration is an attribute of how humans organizing themselves and not a function of their individual distinctive characteristics (like their principles, visions and values). Cf FRANCO, Augusto (2008). School Networks: New views on society, development, internet, politics, and world glocalization. Curitiba: School-of-Networks, 2008.

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(4) Cf. THOMPSON, William Irwin org. (1987). Gaia: uma teoria do conhecimento. So Paulo: Gaia-Global, 1990. (5) BARAN, Paul (1964). On distributed communications: I. Introduction to distributed communications networks. (Memorandum RM-3420-PR August 1964). Santa Monica: The Rand Corporation, 1964. (6) The degree of distribution (or centralization) of a network depends on the number of connections (a function of the number of nodes), on the number of nodes disconnected with the elimination of the most connected node and on the number of connections eliminated by removing the more connected node. Cf FRANCO, Augusto (2009): The power of social networks. Available at http://www.slideshare.net/ augustodefranco/o-poder-nas-redes-sociais-2aversao (7) In the ctional universe of Star Trek (The Next Generation), the Borgs are a "race" of alien cyborgs, humanoids of various species assimilated and improved with the injection of nanoprobes and application of cybernetic implants that alter their anatomy and their biochemical functioning, expanding
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their mental and physical abilities. When they nd their prey - any members of other civilizations, which they are always hunting - the Borgs recite, with some variations, the following litany: "We are the Borgs. Existence as you know is over. We will add your biological and technological qualities to ours. Resistance is futile." There is no such thing as a Borg social network, with some signicant degree of distribution, because there is no Borg-person. Transformed into replaceable individuals, the Borgs are replicated in series by a structure highly centralized in their queen (yes, the system is an absolute monarchy), the only one who can think freely (if that is possible without talking to other people). Their brains are wired to a collective mind (the Borg Collective) controlled by a central hub (Unimatrix A). The stated goal of the Borg people (which can only be called people at that particular original meaning of the Latin word 'populus' = "contingent of troops") is "to improve all the species bringing order to chaos." A possible interpretation of the metaphor is: somehow anyone turned into a replaceable part of a centralized organization (hierarchical), is - to some extent - a Borg. Note from the book FRANCO, Augusto (2011). Fluzz: vida humana e convivncia social nos novos

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mundos altamente conectados do terceiro milnio. So Paulo: Escola-de-Redes, 2011. (8) MATURANA, Humberto & VERDEN-ZLLER, Gerda (1993). Amor y Juego: fundamentos olvidados de lo humano desde el Patriarcado a la Democracia. Santiago: Editorial Instituto de Terapia Cognitiva, 1997. (There is also a Portuguese version: Amar e brincar: fundamentos esquecidos do humano. So Paulo: Palas Athena, 2004). (9) BLACK, Bob (1985). The Abolition of Work and Other Essays. Port Townsend: Loompanics Unlimited, 1986. A Portuguese translation of the manifesto "A abolio do trabalho" is available at http://www.4shared.com/ le/219719893/b8942012/ A_ABOLIO_DO_TRABALHO_Black.html (10) SAINT-EXUPERY, Antoine (1939). Terra dos homens. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2006. (11) Considering the evolutionary history of the homo sapiens, people have no reason to be guided by the idea that there is a (unique) true belief and to adopt practices of exclusion and denial of the ones who have their own different beliefs and do not want to
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abandon them and turn to the beliefs of another group just to be accepted and validated by such a group (which is what characterizes the religious practice). This would have drastically reduced the possibilities of interaction between groups of different origins, with obvious negative impact on their survival. If humans had followed such policies, exchanges would not have happened and trade would not have ourished. For the adoption of such guidance leads inexorably to the formation of closed groups of believers, and induces the enclosure in the clusters that share the same faith (or rather, the same belief), with no shortcuts to other clusters (composed by the indels). But that's what was done by religions for millennia (producing enmity in the world and countless wars) and they are still doing it, albeit on a smaller scale (as in highly connected worlds it is almost impossible to maintain this behavior), except perhaps in certain strains of the Islam (with disastrous results, well known by everyone today). (12) Cf. MATURANA, Humberto. Op. cit. (13) At the edge, even war weaponry can be blessed (as done by some hierarchus maximus of a church 110

considered by their religion as infallible - in the middle of the last century). (14) HOBBES, Thomas (1651). Leviat. So Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003. (15) Cf. BLUMENTHAL, Matthew (2007). Fraternidade separa lderes de perdedores nos EUA. Folha de So Paulo: Caderno Cotidiano, 14 de outubro de 2007. Available at http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/ cotidian/ff1410200727.htm (16) It is no coincidence that the concept of work has emerged in ancient Mesopotamia with the connotation of suffering. Incidentally, in Sumerian mythology, according to the "Epic of Creation" which contains some of the earliest mentions we know of a priestly culture, hierarchical and autocratic - the men would have been created by the gods to "work forever and free the gods .. .", or bear the yoke, and suffer fatigue. Men have been created as workers - inferiors, slaves of the gods - to provide the freedom of the gods, who then started demanding worship from men. Worship originally meant, according to biblical accounts, working for the superior beings: work for a deity and that deity
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was simultaneously "lord", "ruler", "king", "governor" and "owner" - in short, superior. The ancient men of the autocratic hierarchical systems not properly worshiped their gods, but they feared them and worked for them. And, of course, for their human intermediaries: the priests. Cf Epic of Creation Enuma Elish (or Enma Eli) is the Babylonian creation myth. It was discovered by Austen Henry Layard in 1849 (in a fragmentary form) in the ruined Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (Mosul, Iraq), and published by George Smith in 1876. See SMITH, George (1876). The Chaldean Account of Genesis. London: s / d. 1876. Here is the passage quoted from the Enuma Elish: "He created man (and woman) living beings, to work forever, and release the gods of other charges ...". A dubious version in Portuguese is available here: http:// www.angelre.com/me/babiloniabrasil/enelish.html Tablets 1 and 2 are available: http://wikisource.org/ wiki/Enuma_Elish (17) Cf. HOBBES, T. Op. cit. (18) Cf. FRANCO, Augusto (2012). Small Bangs: instrues para construir uma bomba criativa.

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Available at http://net-hcw.ning.com/page/smallbangs (19) Cf. FRANCO, Augusto (2011). Netweaver Howto (Como se tornar um netweaver). Available at http:// escoladeredes.net/group/uzz/forum/attachment/ download?id=2384710%3AUploadedFile %3A164075 (20) SAINT-EXUPERY, A. Op. cit. (21) Cf. FRANCO, Augusto (2011). Resista tentao de pertencer a um grupo. Available at http:// www.slideshare.net/augustodefranco/resista-tentaode-pertencer-a-um-grupo (22) A measure to deprogram the software that was installed on you by the family and to stop projecting your parents in the bosses and authorities in general. The best way to do this is, obviously, not to have bosses. But even that is not enough. One should also not be anyone's boss. And you do not have to respect the authorities in particular. All people must be respected: they are equal to you. A child should be respected in its humanity as any senior. The elder must not be more respected than
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the younger because they could be your father or mother, as it is currently said. The rich, powerful, wise and famous person should not be revered in a differential mode, as often occurs. There is no one more important than you. It is not only necessary to believe that, but to behave coherently with this conviction. (23) Perhaps the main measure to reprogram what the family embedded in you - when they wanted to educate you, teach you, format you, prepare you to be an adult with such and such preconceived characteristics - is to relearn how to play. No matter how old you are, it is always possible to play, to interact with others without expecting results, without a purpose other than pleasure, and the enjoyment of sharing. If you nd it impossible to do this, then your case is lost. You can only exit the Matrix by becoming a child again. (24) It is not that there cannot be a truth (for you). The key here is to give up the idea that there is a path to the truth that can be revealed to others by an organization. In this spirit Jiddu Krishnamurti made a remark on October 21, 1980: "Truth is a pathless land. The man did not come to it through any
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organization, any belief, no dogma, no priest or ritual, nor through philosophic knowledge or any psychological technique. He has to nd it through the mirror of relationships ... "See Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1980). Available at http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/pt/ about-krishnamurti/dissolution-speech.php (25) The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (aka Osho) solved the riddle when he identied the gods of religions as programs that make the ow vertical: "I have no God, therefore, I have no program for you in which you can be turned into a slave". Incidentally, Osho, as Krishnamurti and Tao - Zen included, when disconnected from the religious adhesions of Buddhism, acting as an antivirus program or a game to destroy certainties - that can be of much help in the effort to get out of the Matrix. (26) We call "transformacionismo" - the transformer mind - the kind of perverse ideology according to which human beings come with defects that must be repaired by any hierarchical institution (be it a school, a church, a military organization, a corporation, a party, a State or some kind of spiritual order, sect, society or fraternity). These institutions would be, on the one hand, reformatories to educate people, to say, teach them, train them, tame them;
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or, on the other hand, environments to give rise to their inner development, putting them on the path of their mental or spiritual evolution. This perversion acquired other forms nowadays, more explicitly political, from the belief that the transformation of the people (in that what they are not) come with the transformation of society (in what it is not, by performing some authoritarian utopia that ultimately "will put the house in order"). This transformation would be promoted by the conscious intervention of political, social or environmental activism - always crowded in hierarchical organizations - which would transfuse their awareness to the ignorant masses leading them toward a bright future. This ideology is deconstructed with the acceptance that we must be what we are and not what we are not (there is nothing wrong with us), that there is no place to go other than that for which we go (and that can not be known beforehand for some wise organization of beings more aware or more evolved, which possesses some superior knowledge of the mechanisms immanent or transcendent to history) and that the distributed social networks (people interacting freely) are not a tool to change but the change itself.

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(27) Para uma viso da democracia cooperativa cf. FRANCO, Augusto (2011). Democracia: um programa autodidtico de aprendizagem. Available at http://www.slideshare.net/augustodefranco/ democracia-um-programa-autodidatico-deaprendizagem (28) Cf. FRANCO, Augusto & LESSA, Nilton (2011). Multiversidade : da Universidade dos anos 1000 Multiversidade nos anos 2000. Available at http:// www.slideshare.net/augustodefranco/ multiversidade-10753463 (29) Cf. FRANCO, Augusto (2012). Cocriao: reinventando o conceito. Available at http:// www.slideshare.net/augustodefranco/cocriaoreinventando-o-conceito-11321907 30) George Orwell (1948) in their disturbing Reections on Gandhi drew perhaps the most profound (and courageous) critique of religious discipline by taking as an example that "Gandhi imposed the discipline to himself and that - although he may not urge his followers to observe it in every detail - he believed it to be essential if we wanted to serve God and humanity. Firstly, do not eat meat and, if possible, any
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animal in any form ... No alcohol or tobacco, no seasoning or condiment, even vegetable ... Secondly, if possible, no sex ... And nally - this is the main point - for those seeking goodness there should be no close friendships and exclusive loves." Then comes the harsh criticism of Orwell: "The key in the fact of being human is that we do not seek perfection, it is that sometimes we are likely to commit sins in the name of loyalty, it is that we assume asceticism to the point of making a friendship impossible, that in the end we are prepared to be defeated and fragmented by life, which is the inevitable price we pay when we x our love of other human beings. No doubt alcohol, tobacco etc. are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. For this there is an obvious replica, but we must be cautious in making it. In this era dominated by yogis, it is too quickly assumed that not only the "detachment" is better than full acceptance of earthly life, as well as the ordinary man only rejects it because it is very difcult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful that this is true. Many people do not sincerely desire to be saints, and it is likely that the ones that reach sanctity, or who aspire to it, have never be really tempted to be human beings." Realizing that the
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"common man", the "average human" is not "a loser saint" was the big discovery of Orwell, unmasking what was imposed on us by the churches placing as the ideal for the overcoming of the human, their improvement, the "spiritualization", as if there were something wrong with living your life without being submitted to any religious discipline, asceticism, even when directed to the good of humanity (like the saints, bodhisattvas and Mahatmas - that perhaps, have failed to reach to be ordinary people). See ORWELL, George (1948). Reections on Gandhi in ORWELL, George (1984). Inside the whale and other essays. So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2005. (31) Psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists who treat pathologies and incidents to who remains in this condition [celebrity] have a lot to tell about the personality disorder that may lead, in certain circumstances, when combined with other factors, to the emergence of self-destructive impulses ... Even if such extreme consequences do not happen, there is always an isolation (that cruel isolation that all the great hierarchical leaders and drivers of herds complain about), caused by the impoundment of uzz. To a certain extent, in hierarchical societies and organizations we turn ourselves (all of us, not
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just celebrities) into beings of appearance, deformed by broadcasting, using our antennas almost solely to spread the features of our persona (as we want others to see us) and not to capture other patterns of coexistence. That is how we have not developed our hub-features and, consequently, we lose interactivity, especially because we do not keep ourselves open to interaction with the unpredictable others, in fear of being confused with anyone, with beings of lesser importance than we think we have (because they have fewer titles, less wealth, less abilities or less popularity than us). To protect ourselves from free interaction, we now live only with those who look like us and we are becoming more like them, by a mechanism that has been explained by physicist Mark Buchanan (2007) in The social atom [op. cit. below]. As a result, we are increasingly trapped in the underworld of the unique world: though living in a megalopolis of ten million inhabitants, we attend the same clubs, live in the same neighborhoods, we enjoy our holidays in the same places and do the same travel itineraries, play the same games, we use the same clothes and have the same conversations ... When one puts himself in a process of uzz, he ceases to struggle to go upward, to succeed, to match or imitate the rich, the powerful,
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the famous and the ones that have many titles. Freeing themselves from the requirement to be a VIP (very important person), he or she begins to revalue its horizontal relationships. In this therapeutic journey, they heal from the social diseases associated with disturbances in the social eld introduced by hierarchy, and walk at their own pace and in their own way toward the ultimate goal of turning into a common person. Note extracted from FRANCO, Augusto (2011). Fluzz: op. cit. See also Buchanan, Mark (2007). The social atom. Sao Paulo: Leopard, 2010. (32) There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being. Letter to Augusta Gregory (22/11/1902) from James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (1959). Cf. ELLMANN, Richard (1959). James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1983. (33) The failure of "successful people" is that they are private people. People who closed themselves to the interaction with the unpredictable other, and, in doing so, despite being well known, blocked connections to the cloud that involve them, cut the shortcuts in the clusters (by refusing to serve as bridges), excluded others from their living spaces and simultaneously excluded themselves from other worlds, being
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isolated from the human superorganism and missing a part (just that unusual part that marketers, professional politicians and social psychologists seek and cannot nd) of the immense potentialities of the social. Very few successful people allow common people to approach them. Their addresses, emails and phone numbers are kept private. Their work environments are protected by porters, security guards, secretaries and advisers. Their websites and blogs are closed to comments or mediated. Their participation in social media is always to use them as a broadcast, to public relations and advertising of themselves (to be more famous and earn the economic, social and political differentially conferred to the ones that reach such a condition). This ends up manifesting as what they believe to be their personal lives, as individuals, supposedly autonomous, so important that they cannot be vulnerable to the paparazzi relationship. As a result, they begin to develop that sociopathy better known by the name of fame. Actually they get sick because of their poor interactivity. Who does not want to be the door, do not nd paths. Success is the best way to lose paths. The loss of paths is also a measure of non-network, or an expression of power. The counterpart of this which will be very important is the
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lack of importance to the network (and it's not important if these successful people have thousands or millions of followers in social media or if their blogs have thousands or millions of pageviews). Who does not nd (new) ways, can not nd a way out of the Matrix. Note partially extracted FRANCO, Augusto (2011). Fluzz. Op. (34) Cypher was assigned to the Zion hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar under the command of Morpheus. Cypher's job, as with all other operatives, was to free human minds trapped within the Matrix. Cypher was dreadfully unhappy with the nature of reality in comparison to the relative comforts found within the illusory world of the Matrix. Cf. http:// matrix.wikia.com/wiki/Cypher

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Augusto Franco is a writer, speaker and consultant. He is the creator and one of the netweavers of Escola-deRedes - a network of people dedicated to research on social networks and the creation and transfer of netweaving technologies. He is the author of over two dozen books on local development, social capital, democracy and social networks.

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