Enforced Heteronomy

The root cause of our mental un-health (or mental unwellness) is – I would argue – that we are not allowed to be ourselves. This might sound too simple, or ‘not scientific enough’, but it’s a simple thing that we’re talking about here. Getting all fancy and technical about it is missing the point! It’s actually obscuring the point! We exist in an environment that – for whatever reasons – will not allow us to be ourselves, and if not being able to be ourselves (nor know who we are) isn’t a definition of mental unwellness then what is? Another way of putting this is to say that our lack of mental health is due to our autonomy as individuals being compromised, without us being able to know that it has. Ivan Illich expresses this same idea by saying that in society we are ‘heteronomous rather than autonomous’. Heteronomy is the state of being in which are defined and regulated from without, instead of being free to be who we actually are and do what is truly in our nature to do. Few would argue that this is a healthy or wholesome way to be, and yet this is without question the situation that we find ourselves in! That’s the world we have made for ourselves…

 

Heteronomy is the something that our modern society produces to a very extreme degree; society – in its current super-invasive format – defines everything about us. It tells us what we like and what we don’t like, it provides the template for our generic identities. It is and never has been good to be defined by an external structure (by the church, by a political movement, by local cultural influences, or whatever) but to allow ourselves to be defined and regulated by a system that is purely and solely driven by its agenda to sell us things can hardly be anything other than extraordinarily pathological. It is ridiculously farcical, but at the same time deeply sinister, because we let it eat us up without any complaint. We don’t stand up to it, we cave in every time, we put up with any indignity. It is as if our spirit has been somehow broken by this apparently innocuous thing we blithely call ‘the consumerist way of life’; it’s as if human beings don’t exist anymore – only sad shadows that uncomplainingly go through the paces of the ridiculous superficial game that we have been given in place of life…

 

We have no autonomy because everything comes from the outside, and when ‘everything is supplied from the outside’ then this means that there is no inside, or no room for anything on the inside, and this is just another way of saying that there is no room for ourselves, for our true genuine inner lives.  When everything comes from the outside then this is a disaster of the very greatest proportions, as Jung says here in this quote from On The Psychology Of The Trickster Figure. Collected Works Vol 9 (Part 1) –

 

The disastrous idea that everything comes to the human psyche from outside and that it is born a tabula rasa is responsible for the erroneous belief that under normal circumstances the individual is in perfect order. He then looks to the State for salvation, and makes society pay for his inefficiency.

 

He thinks the meaning of existence would be discovered if food and clothing were delivered to him gratis on his own doorstep, or if everybody possessed an automobile. Such are the puerilities that rise up in place of an unconscious shadow and keep it unconscious. As a result of these prejudices, the individual feels totally dependent on his environment and loses all capacity for introspection. In this way his code of ethics is replaced by a knowledge of what is permitted or forbidden or ordered.

 

How, under these circumstances, can one expect a soldier to subject an order received from a superior to ethical scrutiny? He has not yet made the discovery that he might be capable of spontaneous ethical impulses, and of performing them – even when no one is looking.

 

We are the inside, not the outside. We’re what’s been overlooked. The outside has nothing to do with us – not only is it foreign to our true nature (so to speak), it’s actually inimical to us. The thing is however that when we’re heteronomous we no longer have a sense of ‘the inside, we no longer have any true interiority. Instead, we have a false sense of interiority which is really just the outside that has been ‘introjected’ (or internalized) by the process of socialization. We think that the alien introject is us, in other words. The better things are going for the alien introject the worse off we are – its ‘health’ is our ‘lack of health’, so to speak (even though we can’t really speak in terms of ‘the health of the introject’ since an introject isn’t a living thing). It would have to be genuinely alive in order to have health and it isn’t – it isn’t alive at all. It belongs to another realm, not the realm of life. It belongs to what Plato would call ‘the world of shadows’, not the world of light…

 

Heteronomy means that when I make a choice, something inside me chooses for me and I don’t know it! On the contrary, I think that I have ‘made a choice’, I think that I have ‘acted autonomously’, and this feels good. This type of ‘feeling good’ isn’t however the type of good feeling that comes with being genuinely free, it’s an analogue of that. It’s the good feeling that comes with ‘playing it safe whilst at the same time thinking that you’re taking a risk’, it’s the type of good feeling that comes when we allow ourselves to be tricked into believing the ‘theatre of freedom’ when really we should know better! A simpler way of putting this is then to say that the pleasurable / satisfying feeling of ‘false autonomy’ comes about as a direct result of us believing something that isn’t actually true, and as soon as we say this we can see that this ‘inverted’ situation is never going to be conducive to good mental health!

 

Technically, what we’re talking about here can be described as ‘playing a game’, which is something that we are of course all very familiar with! When we are 100% immersed in the game of conditioned life then we are ‘eligible’, so to speak, to experience the good feeling that comes from thinking that we are acting autonomously when we’re not. We are also eligible to experience the motivation to want to be able to act autonomously in a successful rather than an unsuccessful way in the future even when this doesn’t seem to be working out for us at the moment and this motivation is also potentially very rewarding since we can pleasurably anticipate ‘doing what we want to do’ in the future, even though it isn’t really ‘what we want to do’ but only what our conditioning wants us to do. The actual authenticity of our wants and needs doesn’t matter therefore because we will still stand to experience pleasure and satisfaction when they are met. If all we want is to feel good then who cares?

 

This therefore represents a very potent incentive not to see through the game! We don’t want to spoil things by going into them too deeply. But then the other side of the coin is of course the bad feeling that comes when we are unable – for whatever reason – to successfully act out the impulses that we mistakenly imagine to be our own free will (but which are in reality nothing more than ‘the rules of the games’ that we have internalized). The euphoria of successfully acting out the impulses along with the dysphoria of not being able to do so make up the ongoing drama of everyday (or ‘conditioned’) life and the game of trying to obtain the one and avoid the other generally keeps us busy enough so that we don’t need to look too closely at what we actually doing. The package works perfectly well for the majority of the time in other words and so we rarely find the need to look beyond it…

 

Our conceptions of what is meant by ‘good mental health’ can therefore be seen entirely within this context – which is ‘the context of us playing the game of being autonomous when we’re not’. We see our psychological well being as being directly linked to how well we are able to perform within this game that we do not acknowledge as a game and as long as we are able to maintain the perception that we are able to enact our imaginary autonomy (or at least believe in the possibility of us being able to do so in the future) then we are going to say that we are getting on just fine. We can’t call this real ‘mental health’ because it doesn’t involve any actual autonomy but it does all the same act as a perfectly serviceable surrogate or analogue for the real thing. All seems to be rosy – or at the very least potentially rosy – in the garden, therefore. Problems start appearing on the scene however when we can no longer maintain this vital perception that we are either ‘in control’ or at least ‘potentially in control’.   Alongside this problem – which is known to us all as anxiety – there is another related glitch and that is when we can no longer maintain the perception that there actually is anything in the game worth striving for (or – conversely – that what we have already gained or achieved is in fact not in reality worth anything). This second glitch in the game is of course what we call depression.

 

A more succinct way of putting this is to say that anxiety is where we are unable to believe any more in our ability to successfully manipulate outcomes within the game and depression is where the outcomes (whether we achieve them or not) no longer mean anything to us and, more than this, actually appear to us to be utterly fraudulent. Given the fact that we construct our identity on the twin basis of what psychologists sometimes call ‘self-efficacy’ (i.e. the belief that one has that one can successfully obtain one’s goals) and what we imagine ourselves to have obtained on the basis of this illusory ‘self-efficacy’ of ours, the failure of the game to supply us with a believable package is absolutely devastating in its effect. It is devastating because all we know is the game, and so when the game gets ‘spoiled’ for us as it does by anxiety and depression, we have nothing else to turn to.

 

When we’re playing the game that we’re autonomous when we’re not (because in reality we’re being ‘externally determined’ every step of the way) then we may said to be ‘psychologically unconscious’. ‘Unconscious life’ is that life where we follow the script that has been handed to us without ever realizing that we are doing do, or that there actually is any script. We follow the script that we have been provided with whilst fondly imagining the whole time that ‘we’re coming up with it all by ourselves’. We’re playing a game without knowing that we’re playing game. We might wish to say that the script is being provided for us by society, or by ‘the external authority’ of the system we live in, or we might say that it is being given to us by ‘the conditioned mind’ – it doesn’t matter which words we use because it all comes down to the same thing – we’re being externally determined. No matter how we say it, it all comes down to the fact that we have no autonomy, and therefore no true sense of who we actually are or what we actually might want to do with our lives.

 

This state of being ‘externally determined’ is the ubiquitous state of affairs and it is pointless for us to go around trying to say what we have just said to anyone we might happen to meet because the chances are very much that they won’t understand a word that you are saying. To be unconscious not only means that you don’t know that you are, it also means that you don’t even have the referents to understand what it is that is being talked about. This brings us to a crucial point in relation to anxiety and depression and the neurotic mental disturbances in general. The point is this – when we are psychologically unconscious ourselves and we come across someone who is anxious or depressed (because the game is no longer working for them) then we are of course going to try to ‘help them’ by returning them to a state of ‘happy equilibrium within the game that we’re not acknowledging to be a game’. There is no way that we’re not going to try to do this! What we can’t see is that there is a real chance here (amidst all the distress and suffering) of discovering our true autonomy, since we can’t discover freedom until we discover the fact that we don’t have any! If we ourselves are psychologically unconscious then what we have just said here will be fundamentally incomprehensible to us because we honestly (if erroneously) believe ourselves to be already free…

 

 

 

 

 

Mental Health In A Dishonest World

The more I think about it the more it seems to me that the world we have created for ourselves is making us mentally unwell – which is to say, chronically unhappy / distressed. It’s fashionable in science these days to attribute everything to our genes and say that anxiety or depression (for example) is due to ‘errors in our genetic coding’, but why would our coding suddenly start acting up after tens and hundreds of thousands of years of good service? If we look at the graph for the increase in rates of incidence for anxiety and depression over the last sixty years we can see the curves shooting up dramatically, so why have our genes suddenly taken to misbehaving in this way? Why are they letting us down just now that we seem to be doing so well as a species? If it was a company we were talking about here (and not the mental health of the human race) and sales were going down in a similarly dramatic way, we would be doing some serious soul-searching, but all we’re doing is sitting on our arses and blaming our genes!

 

We have invented a very strange world for ourselves during the course of the last century, and it’s not ‘strange’ in any good way. The world we have inadvertently created for ourselves (and there’s no need to assume that we actually knew what we were doing at any point in the process) is based entirely on the large-scale manipulation of entire populations for the sake of making money, which is also (and more succinctly) known as ‘consumerism’. There used to be such a thing as ‘the world of commerce’, and that was fine as far as it went, but now the world of commerce and the world which we know and live in have become one and the same thing. There’s no ‘overlap’, it’s not a question of two circles (or sets) intersecting on Venn diagram, there’s only the one ‘circle’. Commerce (or consumerism) has taken over almost all aspects of our life and we are so used to this appalling incursion that we see nothing odd about it. The key point that I want to make here however is that ‘consumerism’ and ‘manipulation’ always go hand in hand, as we all know very well, were we to actually think about it! It’s a very bad model to follow, in other words, no matter what those in positions of power may tell us…

 

We have, therefore, created a world for ourselves that is based on the systematic manipulation of whole populations and there is no way that anyone can say that this is good for our mental health! Human beings have always manipulated and tricked each other it is true, this being one half of what we call ‘human nature’, but it is only very recently in the history of the human race that we have had the means to create an entire self-consistent environment based entirely on the principle of deception / manipulation. What Jean Baudrillard called ‘the world of the hyperreal’ only became a possibility in the last thirty years; we didn’t have the data-processing and storage power to create it until towards the end of the twentieth century. Deception and manipulation is all that goes on in the world of hyperreality – it’s not a matter of ‘truth’ on the one hand and ‘deception’ on the other, it’s all deception, from beginning to end! The world our children are born into in recent times is a high-tech virtual reality ‘global construct’ designed specifically for the purpose of manipulating those who live in it, and – needless to say – we don’t have any choice about living in it! That’s a choice we are never given…

 

We would have to be completely blind not to see that this is the case, and we’d have to be outright knaves and villains to deny it! Having said this though, we have to acknowledge that we’ve actually all been made blind, to a greater or lesser extent. We have been inflicted with blindness from an early age, as part of our indoctrination. The idea of commerce (or consumerism) as an entire way of life has been beaten into us from the dawn of modern ‘behaviourism-based’ advertising back in the nineteen twenties. This – arguably – was when advertising first started to ‘get inside our heads’. Not only has consumerism as a way of life been normalized, we have been repeatedly told, in various ways, that it is a healthy and wholesome way for us to organize society. We’ve been told that it’s the ONLY way to organize society! Very powerful vested interests have made sure that this message has been effectively put across. As a result, the capitalist way of life has become a religion, enshrined in Holy Dogma just as a religion is, and at the core of the dogma is the right of a small group of people to persuade another, much larger and less powerful group that they need a whole range of products / services and then sell it to them.

 

This however is not a discussion of politics or political philosophy, but something much more practical and pressing in nature, namely our mental health! The consequence of setting up the whole world for the benefit of commercial interests has been – as we have said – that we have replaced the natural (or unconstructed) world with a virtual reality global construct designed specifically for manipulating the entire population of the planet and – crucially for our argument – there is nothing in this VR construct (this hyperreal world) that in any way supports our mental health. There might of course be goods and services advertised and promoted that claim to support our mental health (there are in fact lots!) but this is just another angle that Big Business is using in order to sell us stuff. It’s a particularly good angle – the system makes us sick and then it sells us more stuff that is supposed to cure us of the sickness that it itself has created! How clever is that?

 

The only thing that can support our mental health is the natural world (or – equivalently – ‘human beings who are not trying, either knowingly or unknowingly, to deceive and manipulate us’, which is a very great rarity) and this happens to be the one thing that the commercially-orientated hyperreal construct we fondly call ‘modern civilization’ can never supply us with. We can draw a very good parallel with toxic relationships here – the only thing a toxic friend / partner / family member can do to help us is step away and leave us alone, and this also happens to be the one thing that they will never do – not of their own free will, anyway! That is the one thing the viral Global Construct is never going to do either. The world we have created for ourselves is fundamentally deceptive, fundamentally dishonest. Like the advertising images we see everywhere (the advertising images that have become the whole world to us) nothing is what it seems to be, nothing is what it says it is. Sincerity is an impossibility in this world since sincerity doesn’t sell products! Sincerity is an impossibility in our own personal lives too since it will get us fired in a hurry – if we work for a company or an organization then as we all know we have to ‘tow the party line’, we have to ‘play the game that we are expected to play’. We have to adopt the role that has been given to us to play, and play it as if we mean it. To live in a world that is fundamentally deceptive and fundamentally manipulative is inevitably going to cost us dear in terms of our mental health, but somehow no one is focussing on this…

 

 

 

Art: Keiichi Matsuda