Throughout the Series there has been a struggle, a War even, between a powerful Hegemon and a somewhat disorganized, insouciant Resistance. The Hegemon is the Devil lurking in the Dark Forest, his sulphurous waft pervading the entire forest.
And the philosophical Devil, simply put, is the almost universal assumption that modern peoples, East and West, have adopted, most of us unknowingly, unwittingly, that there is a Third Party World out there, an ‘objective reality’ that exists on its own whether or not there are living creatures inhabiting it.
When we look up at the night sky, we can see thousands, possibly millions, of stars, which we have scientifically deduced are inanimate balls of brightly burning gas, with darker, smaller blobs in between made of denser matter that are planets in orbit around their larger stars. There is evidence that the world exists without intelligence, without sentience, without soul, without purpose. At the particulate level we find not stars and planets but a remarkably similar-looking universe, namely no end of billiard-ball like particles orbiting around each other, albeit when we go deeper we find quarks and such that zoom in an out, that split into two, that can disappear and magically reappear in a different place, that have been determined to be ‘potentiae’, in other words something between being and non-being and which moreover behave according to the presence of the observers. Naturally, we do not imagine that stars and planets follow those same rules, but it does give pause to many scientists who have followed the materialist assumption as far as it can go and found that the building blocks of physical matter – of what is real versus what is conceived or imagined – exists in a borderland between existence and non-existence.
So the assumption that only the physical is real and anything else is not real lacks any observable, scientific basis making a self-existing, inanimate basis of a Reality which is, therefore, a non-living matrix. Some even insist that mind is only illusory and similarly inanimate, essentially an hallucination caused by chemical interactions in the physical brain.
This assumption, that there is a ‘third party’ view, a view without a mind or soul, a mechanical basis of all Reality, is the modern age’s Philosophical Devil.
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