Monsieur René and his Gridlock Kids

Before reading Descartes' meditations, I only had enough of a grasp on his influence as to say, 'there's this guy that is a major proponent of Western culture's domination for the past 400 years' - a statement of which, predictably, I could convince no one.

It's still hard to sell to people the idea that we're living in our the shadow of a father many of us never knew or have even heard of.
Nearly every day I am reminded of some latent bastion of his work and the rules by which we try desperately to live. This is evident as one confronts any situation that imposes a binary mindset, a polarized black and white scenario which doesn't quite seem to envelope the weight of the choice at hand; a key example being neoclassical economics: according to the rudimentary grid, a Cartesian coordinate plane, we will behave as rational consumers in order to make the system work... And indeed the system functions on some level, but the rationality of the rational thinkers might be, in a relative way, totally fucked.
Look at it this way: this system of economy is nearly impossible to run the way it is supposed to be, because it presumes a simplistic ideal of rationality and facilitates human suffering; so if we're being true Cartesians, our long-standing attempt to maintain it is a failure.

But it works for some, no?
Obviously it isn't that simple then. The failure of economics is not complete, thus the binary model is what truly fails us here.

I'm getting an uncanny connection to The Matrix here, in more ways than I'd care to admit: for one, in Keanu Reeves' feeling that 'something just doesn't seem right about reality,' which applies in the sense that in fact, something does not seem quite right about the rules we follow for the sake of participating in society, with our irrational minds and bodies; and yet to be told of the existence of an Architect who built a system at odds with these qualities is going to mean nothing unless we can think of another way to run their invention.

Now I'm not saying I think we're literally subjects connected to an artificial reality while our bodies float in a pod of bile on a giant mechanical hive that harvests our physiological energy into a power grid. But you've got to appreciate the metaphor.