What is surrender?

Warning: Nihilism ahead

I've been seeing the connections lately between what Dillard has to say about the joke in life - that we are sewn into it like so much corn, and that being sewn into it makes us subject to it - and some of the epic stories that have graced the movie theaters in my lifetime: the Matrix and Hunger Games keep popping up.

What strikes me is that these movies give us hope - like Dr. Snow in the Hunger Games points out - but it is a false hope. In the Matrix, Neo gets out of the Matrix, and then goes on to fight the bad guys who are keeping everyone else hooked up to the big joke. In the Hunger Games, where everyone is pitted against each other and everyone is on their own (much as in life), the heroine beats the game by threatening suicide, and she is able to save someone else's life. She then goes on to rebel against the people who control the game and all of society.

But in real life there is no one controlling the game and there is no one keeping us connected to an artificial matrix. The matrix we are in is real, and we cannot get out of it. We can commit suicide, but even this is only a temporary release from the struggle. We are stuck here, "spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us on a tree root, or jam us on a stone." Not just possibly, but likely. And that's the part that is hard to understand and hard to accept. 

We are pitted against each other. We are alone, and yet we want to be united. We can make alliances or we can create unions with another sorry soul, but these are only useful tools for advancing our chances at survival. We are in bodies that are designed to survive through manipulation, cheating, and lying. We are not designed to want to be here. We are designed to want what we are not. We can only be liberated from suffering by accepting that these feet are likely to fell us on a tree root, and to see life as a joke instead of a symphony. We are liberated through surrendering not just to our own incompetence, but to our immorality as well, to our selfishness and to the endless cycles of living and dying, and to pragmatism.