There's a specific confusion at the center of all this that's worth naming precisely: the confusion between seeing the mechanism and standing outside the mechanism. These are two completely different things.

You can understand perfectly how a trap works and still be inside it. You can describe exactly how a system's springs move and still be part of its operation. Seeing isn't getting out; naming isn't transforming, but the posture South Park installed over 25 years operates exactly on that confusion: it produces the feeling that lucidity is a real form of freedom, that understanding something is equivalent to standing outside of it.

The perfect viewer South Park manufactured isn't passive or ignorant. He's cognitively very active, well informed, capable of sophisticated analysis, who experiences that sophistication as a form of freedom and who, for that very reason, feels no pressure toward anything further, because he's already done what needed doing: he already saw, already understood, already laughed at the right things.

What he doesn't notice, what the installed posture prevents him from noticing, is that this whole movement happened entirely within the space the system can tolerate without any problem, that in this case lucidity isn't the first step of something — it's the first step and also the last.

"I'm alive," he said to the boy while he ate a plate of dates on the night without bonfires or moon. While I'm eating, I don't do anything but eat. If I were walking, I would just walk. If I have to fight, it will be as good a day to die as any.

»Because I do not live in my past or in my future. I only have the present, and that is the only thing that interests me. If you can always stay in the present you will be a happy man. You will perceive that life exists in the desert, that the sky has stars, and that warriors fight because this is partof the human race. Life will be a party, a great festival, because it is only the moment we are living.