Quixote

Don Quixote is a fictional parodic knight, who roams the barren Spanish countryside, and attacks windmills, that he mistakes for menacing giants, so "tilting at windmills". He is accompanied by his squire, Sancho Panza, a comical and wiseman sidekick. His name gave an English qualificative, quixotic, meaning idealistic without regard to practicality, romantic, impulsive, even bizarre, mad.

Quixote is a real knight, courageous and generous, helping people in distress, successor of The Cid and predecessor of Zorro in the New Spain, the Hero with a Thousand Faces, with tradition going back to warriors codes and mythical fights against goliaths.

What is the target of his apparently absurd and vain fight?
Wind mills are relatively simple machines, that transform wind energy in a rotating motion, and, through gears, into a circular mill, used to grind grain, the protective cellulosic outer layer of corn of which makes it undigestible in the raw for humans. They are a prototypal sustainable use of renewable energy for essential food, and the predecessors of modern high-tech giant windmills.

But they are also a large-scale autonomous somewhat humanoïd machines, the embodiment or pareidolia of all machines, from the smallest watch with minuscule precise gears, to the biggest industrial factory. They announce the Modern Age of The Machine, of industrialisation, of use and abuse of fossil fuels, based on the mechanical newtonian physics paradigm, topped by a most passive Watchmaker god, the latest avatar of the old demiurge-architect, C(h)ronos, the Heavens Miller and hourglass reaper. But where the old handmill was alternative or cyclical, the new machine mills and gears transform energy into endless linear motion, to propel global transportation and targeted weapons. Renaissance imagined as a humanist triumph morphs into a hubristic mechanical nightmare, with enclosure and dilapidation of nature, and with malthusian human overshoot, from famined morlocked robotniks to useless neutered Eloi.

The mistake would be the paradigmatic difference between a cyclical motion in a balanced living world, and a linear motion in a endless progress utopia with an exponential growth, now meeting natural limits, into a catastrophical giant cycle, like those giant windmill machines that this impractical Don Quixote intuitively fought. Hallucination or foresight?