Whether this Room or the Next (2017) Drawing by Edwin Loftus

A symbolically nude female sits in the doorway between this room and the next, a library promising more chance to utilize her intelligence. But the floor is peeled away revealing the machinery that is common beneath both this room and the next.
The woman appears bent and uncertain and well she might be. She is offered choices of options designed by others to suit their ends, not her own. Whether in this room or the next, she will still be no more than a servant of the great machine that produces, but also limits her opportunities.
To her side we can see a window, and that window opens onto a very different world, a world beyond what the machine can offer, one in which it is normal for human beings to seek a living doing what they do best because they enjoy it and believe in it and have studied and sought for it, following the examples of a few that have succeeded in spite of the machine.
The machine tries to eliminate awareness of choices beyond those its masters offer and places barriers in the way of pursuing those choices. Though a few may succeed, most never accumulate the capital to even try, their resources sapped away to pay for those that are incapable of pursuing their own dreams, sacrificing the hopes of vast numbers in pointless pity that, in turn, limits the less self-reliant people's range of choices in other people's visions to follow.
The managers of such machines, already having their rewards secured, place burdens and hazards in the way of any who would challenge their positions with new and better ideas and efforts.
The product their machine produces is hopelessness for all that are lower on the spectrum of privilege and vast riches and power for the few at the top, whether they be owners of parts of the machine, or the bureaucrats that enforce the machine's oppression, or the influencers that keep it from ever losing its stranglehold on those oppressed by it.
Those who tell you to sacrifice your resources for the sake of the machine or society seldom are among those who must sacrifice all of their own hopes for a better tomorrow. They crush the dreams of the most capable by forcing them to carry the least capable on their backs while paying others a pittance to bear their share of that burden.
Government is not the means by which the people control the excesses of the richest and most powerful among them. It is the means by which the richest and most powerful control the people. The true Liberation of Humanity is the limitation of government's power through which the richest and most powerful control the people.

Related themes

Social-MachineSocial-ManagementLiberation