What other people think of us doesn’t matter. It’s without meaning. What other people think of you doesn’t matter because what they think isn’t just ‘their own business’ – what they think is them. They’re not meeting us, they’re meeting their own distorted idea of who we are, and we – for our part – are playing along with this. We’re playing along with this as best we can because that’s how the social game works. Compliance is rewarded, deviation punished.
What people think of us has nothing to do with us, therefore – we each live in the world of our own projections (we each live in a world that is made up entirely of ourselves, in other words). We’re living with what William Gibson calls ‘a Seamless Universe of Self’; we are in other words surrounded on all sides by our absurd ideas about the world, by our unexamined expectations of it, by the half-baked assumptions we have unconsciously made about it. In this (seamlessly closed) world nothing figures but ourselves – nothing else is allowed. The world is thus a reflection of our own unrecognised face, just as Carl Jung says.
The undeniable fact that we very much do care what others think of us is telling us something, therefore. It’s telling us something very important – it’s telling us that we are trying to live our lives in terms of how someone else is seeing it. As soon as we notice this peculiar fact – which is admittedly a very rare thing to notice – we see we can’t help seeing that there’s something completely absurd about it. It is – not to beat about the bush too much – an utterly insane situation. It’s an utterly insane situation but it’s also the only situation we know…
The situation where we all live ‘inside each other’s heads’ (or ‘living solely on society’s terms’) instead of simply ‘living’ is absurd to a truly surreal extent and yet we treat it with the utmost seriousness. We couldn’t be more serious about this business of ‘how our peers see us’ – appearing to be a bad or stupid person to others (which is to say, ‘being socially disgraced’) is – as it has been said – a fate worse than death. We’d rather anything than this. we’d rather be swallowed up by a hole in the ground, never to be seen again. That would by far be ‘the preferable fate’.
If ‘how I am perceived by others’ is the overriding factor, the overriding motivation, then what this means is of course that we’re living inside the other person’s head, inside their own peculiar biassed version of reality which simply isn’t real. The question is, therefore – just why the hell would we want to do this? Firstly, we let some other person (some agency, or some group of people) ‘decide what reality is’ – in accordance with their own unaccountable prejudices (which they themselves have had pushed onto them by some external authority) and then secondly, we try to make sure that they like us, that they accept us, that they approve of us, within the terms of this their distorted (and ridiculously inauthentic) version of reality! How crazy is this?
What we’re talking about here is pure insanity, no doubt about it, and yet notwithstanding this fact it’s what we all do. We don’t know any other way of functioning, any other way of being. When we ‘adapt to society’ then what this means is that we are adapting to ‘an arbitrary biassed version of life’, a parody of life, a fake copy of life, and we do this purely on the basis that everyone else is doing it too. Everyone else is doing it so we better jump on board as well, so that we don’t get left behind, so that we don’t let ourselves in to be ridiculed or sneered at by every Joe Soap that comes along, so that we won’t be persecuted and attacked by all of our brainwashed peers…
This is the Social Game (only we’re not allowed to call it a game). Instead, we are obliged to take it with the utmost seriousness, as we have just said. Not only are we obliged to adapt to the Super narrow, super slanted, cock- eyed version of how things are – we are also compelled to compete within it for various illusory prizes. We are compelled to strive to be better at playing the game than everyone else, which meansenacting the biases, which means continually affirming and reaffirming the biases, no matter how patently ludicrous they might be. To compete successfully we are obliged to double down on our support for the unpleasantly prejudiced viewpoint, we are obliged to propagate its ‘truths’ with fanatical fervour. We’re obliged in other words to be better at believing and propagating the lie than anyone else is, and it is this meaningless mechanical ‘pressure to conform’ that we are constantly having to take seriously, that we are constantly getting stressed out about.
We are all super-busy trying to ‘please the system’, so to speak, and our belief (which we do our very best to hang onto) is that this will pay off for us later on. Our belief is that the reward is ‘just around the corner’, as Alan Watts says in one of his lectures. Trying to please the system (at the expense of our actual autonomy) is never going to work, however – the system is geared towards benefitting itself not us, and at the end of the day this is what exactly it is always going to do. When we opt to exist within the common ground that is the ‘agreed-upon’ reality, the ‘consensus’ reality, then what’s happening here is that we are ‘trading authenticity for convenience’. What we ‘accept as being true’ doesn’t have to be actually true, it just needs to be ‘true in relation to what everyone else thinks’. It’s ‘relative truth’ we are concerned with, not anything else. As Kurt Vonnegut says, we agree with people not because we are convinced of the truth of their assertions, but because we want to ‘make friends’.
This is the ‘pragmatic approach’ and it generally pays off on the short term. If we don’t take the pragmatic approach then this ‘unfriendliness’ on our part costs us – life very quickly becomes a hell of a lot more difficult for us and – into the bargain – we are privileged to see a side of the human race that only deviants and non-conformists get to see – we are privileged to see a side to human beings that no one ever admits to. We get to see their ‘shadow side’, we might say – we get to encounter a darkness that society as a whole absolutely refuses to acknowledge. Society’s shadow (which gets darker all the time in accordance with our unconsciousness) is projected on us (because of our non-conformity to the game rules that we don’t admit to being there) and we are treated accordingly…
All of this is inherent in the verynature of social collusion, the very nature of collective enterprise. Collective enterprise means that we all get together on the same page as regards how we are to see things, as to how we are to go about doing things, (or ‘organising things’). Standardisation is needed, in other words. Standards must be set and then adhered to scrupulously – these are the basic mechanics that have to be in place before we can get started on the collective endeavour, before we can all get together on the same page. Rules must be formulated and then established in practice. On one level this makes perfect sense and is a good solution to the problem – if for example each one of us were to speak our own idiosyncratic language there would be no language, we wouldn’t be able to understand each other, and there could be no collective. This is – as anyone who has ever attended Sunday school knows – is the Babel Effect…. If every household appliance ran on a different voltage, then the results would be sheer chaos, and so on and so forth. What we don’t see however is that we can’t apply this same logic to ‘organising the truth’, to applying a standardised formula as regards ‘how we are to see and relate to reality’.
Without recognising the enormity of our presumption, we go straight ahead and take it that this pragmatic principle works ‘across the board’ and that’s what is true for having the same voltage on all household appliances (or having the same size port on all makes of laptops) must also be true, must also be eminently sensible and practicable when it comes to the way that we have of perceiving and describing reality. We charge full steam ahead and standardise this too, without realising what we’ve done here – what we’ve done here is that we have created Samsara, what we’ve done here (by ‘standardizing everything’) is that we have generated our very own Communal Hyperreality Bubble. Reality cannot be standardised – thereIS no authorised viewpoint from which it can be surveyed and mapped out, there is no ‘bird’s eye view’ to paraphrase Ilya Prigogine. ‘Standardised reality’ is an illusion – we can come up with such a thing (even though it’s not real) and then we can substitute it for ‘unstandardized’ (or non-homogenized’) reality if we want to, but when we do this therefore what we’re doing is that we’re replacing the real with the unreal, the actual with the imaginary, just for the sake of ‘pragmatic convenience’. What does ‘convenience’ mean when we’ve lost all touch with the real world, however, and what price do we have to pay for it?
The price we pay for over-simplifying (or simulating) reality in this way can be seen in terms of ‘psychological abuse’, as odd as this might initially sound. When we make adaptation to a defined or standardized version of reality into the rule, into something we all have to do, then a peculiar phenomenon comes into play – a phenomenon whereby we get fleeced, a phenomenon whereby we get taken for a ride without us knowing anything about it. The basic principle behind the oversimplified (or simulated) world – we might say – is of course the Principle of Deception (since nothing about it is true); the basic message of the Simulation – we might then continue to say – is that if we play the game successfully then we will win the supremely important prize. What else are games ever about, after all? When we adapt successfully then there will be a big ‘pay-off’ coming our way as a reward…
We have to pass through a very narrow gate in order to qualify as being worthy of this prize, however – we have to get it exactly right, we have to hit the bullseye dead on. If we think of in terms of ‘gaining acceptance or approval from the social system’ (if we think of this as being ‘the prize’), then we first have to define ourselves narrowly on the system’s terms. That is what is required of us. We gain this validation, this acceptance, by stepping through this exceedingly narrow gate, but in this we are being tricked, we are being spoofed – we’re being tricked because we’ve put ourselves on the ‘same level as the system’ and the system is an empty projection. We’ve been tricked because we’re we’ve handed over everything we’ve got and gain nothing in return. We’ve ‘sold our soul for a mess of pottage’.
This is the problem with trying to ‘please the system’, therefore; this is always the problem – when we try to please the system (no matter how hard we try to conform to the rules, no matter how hard we try to fit in) we get ‘refused entry’. ‘Approval’ is withheld. When we get to the point of sacrificing everything – which we do by defining ourselves entirely within the terms of the system – then we get nothing in return. There is no ‘prize’, we find out that we have been burned…
Image credit – mutualart.com