- The Empire never ended - a millennia old system of royalty and priesthood that has changed the outer form yet remained with political, economic, cultural, religious/scientific, and military control
- The System & The Matrix - designed to keep humanity enslaved and those at the top of the pyramid in power and control
- How we have created an inhuman Machine that exists within, above and beyond all of our institutions and systems. Where human beings become a cog in something that uses them
- Even normal “good” people become cogs in the machine, overseers and slave drivers in the machine
- Egoic cultural conditioning and programming
Christopher Tolkien talks about his father’s idea of “the machine” and why he hated it…. Tolkien also talked about this in letters…
Tolkien described the major themes running through his legendarium like this:
All this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine. . . . By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents—or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised. - From a letter to Milton Waldman found in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 168.