Chapter Fifteen - SO… WHY ARE WE STILL USING IT?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SO… WHY ARE WE STILL USING IT?

IF MATERIALISM LEADS to all this, the emptiness, despair, collapse, and cruelty dressed as logic, why do we keep running the model?

Why hasn’t anyone pulled the plug?

Because it’s easy.
Because it’s clean.
Because it sounds smart on podcasts.

It makes people feel logical.
It lets them roll their eyes at hope.
It gives them something to say when they don’t want to feel anything.

“Oh, it’s just chemicals.”
“Oh, that’s just evolution.”
“Oh, that’s just how the brain works.”

It kills wonder with one sentence and calls it intelligence.

And sure, the model builds cool shit.
Satellites, smartphones, spreadsheets, synthetic hearts.
It gets results.

But results aren’t truth.
Being useful isn’t the same thing as being right.

Materialism wins because it’s good at solving problems.
But it’s terrible at explaining people.

It doesn’t know what to do with beauty.
It doesn’t know what to do with grief.
It doesn’t know what to do with awe, or silence, or a song that makes you snot cry for no reason.

It doesn’t know why a child’s laugh feels holy.
Why you get goosebumps when someone believes in you.
Why holding someone’s hand can make you feel like the world is going to be okay, even when it’s not.

The model just shrugs.

“Useful illusion,” it says.
“Adaptive behavior,” it says.
“Misfiring neurons,” it says.

Always with the same answer:
You’re not feeling something real, you’re just running bad software.

But here’s the thing: you know better.

Not because someone taught you.
Not because you read it in a book.
But because you’ve lived something that doesn’t fit.

Something too big.
Too deep.
Too real to reduce.

You’ve had moments that shattered the model. But you stayed quiet. Because the model has power, and power punishes disbelief.

So we keep using it.
We keep pretending.
We keep repeating that we are only flesh while secretly aching for proof that we’re not.