What – we may ask – is the dirtiest, rottenest, most low-down trick there is? We human beings are experts in the Dirty Tricks Department – our initiative, imagination and improvisation in this area is legendary. No matter how dirty the trick however, it still isn’t going to be a patch on what we might call the Original Dirty Trick, the Archetypal Dirty Trick (which is a trick very few of us would have the imagination to even comprehend, never mind come up with ourselves). We’re talking about the Great Grand-daddy of all scams here. This is the Big Lie Principle taken to the nth degree, a lie so total our minds can’t comprehend it. We come up with echoes of that original dirty trick, we come up with innumerable ‘pale limitations’ of it (since all dirty tricks are in essence copies of the original) but we just don’t have what it takes to appreciate (or reproduce) the sheer astounding scale and scope of the original thing (even though all of our tricks and devices are, as we have said, unconscious imitations of it). We are ‘paying homage to the Master’, whether we realize it or not, we are enacting ‘Satan’s Will’. We are ‘worshiping The Deceiver’.
In this world, dirty tricks of one sort or another are pretty much all we’re ever going to come across. We know nothing else – since there is no such thing as actual honesty, lies have become normalized, so to speak. We are ourselves ‘masters of the dirty trick’ – our success in promoting ourselves (or our clique) in society depends on it. Our success in getting our hands on a bigger slice of the pie than we otherwise would do (and there is always the danger than we might end up with no slice at all, or merely a bit of a crust) depends upon how good we are at selling ourselves, how skilful we are at persuading our fellow human beings that we have something they want, something they need, something will make their lives so much better (in whatever way). What else is consumerism all about if not this? When we are immersed in consumerism we won’t see like this however – instead, we talk about ‘creating value’ which – of course – validates what we’re doing, which – of course – ‘makes a virtue of a vice’. Being a value creator is a cool thing, after all – we’ve earned the respect of our fellows here (and any profit made is surely only what we deserve for bringing extra value into the world. This is the language of business, this is how we legitimise mutual exploitation, or ‘the exploitation of one group of people by another’, which (needless to say) doesn’t sound quite so good. Exploitation is a hard thing to spin in a positive way, but we manage all the same. It perfectly describes what’s going on all around us, but we get around this by inventing a cheap-ass philosophy or value system which makes it seem not just ‘normal’, but actually admirable.
‘Creating value’ is of course always a cheap and nasty euphemism – what we’re really doing is that we’re covertly influencing – via the use of societal power – how people think, how they understand themselves and their place in the world, and then – because of our success in this department (the mind-control department) – we can sell them all sorts of stuff that they don’t really need. We can sell them ‘a lifestyle they don’t need’, and then all the crap that goes with it. We can’t have the lifestyle without the accessories, after all. We sell the game to people, and then – once we’ve done this – we can sell them all the stuff that they need if they are to successfully and stylishly play the game. We market all the accessories that go with the lifestyle that we have been persuaded to put a down-payment on; we create the need and then we market the means of satisfying that need, in other words. To pat ourselves on the back for creating value is therefore a gross distortion (a perfect inversion, in fact) of the truth. Once someone ‘buys the lifestyle’ then we have them hooked on all the endless merch that goes with it and this is something that goes on forever. It’s a lifetime job. We never actually ‘get’ there (and because we’re forever trying to do this, because we’re caught up in the logic of optimization) we never realize that there is no ‘there’ to get to. Contemporary consumer culture is thus one way in which we may approach the topic of ‘the Ultimate Dirty Trick’.
The first step (in this classic scam) is getting you addicted to whatever the Product is, and then the next step is that we extort money from you for supplying you with what you now absolutely need if you are to ‘continue in the style to which you’re accustomed’ (if you are not to ‘go into withdrawal’). This type of trickery is that’s what our world is all about, and the and thus the cleverest trickster is also the most admired. We have nothing but admiration for those who masterfully deceive and exploited their fellow humans in this way – we wish we could be them. Our ambition is to be like them. From this point of view we can see that society itself is thus ‘one big trick’ – a cheap scam that we get caught up in (which is what philosophers, mystics and seers have been telling us right from the word ‘go’). ‘Nature made man happy and good, but society corrupts him and makes him miserable’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells us.
We might object that this isn’t entirely right since not everyone is being tricked. Most of us are, we will agree, but the ones who are actually doing the tricking (the tricksters themselves) aren’t – I’m tricking you, after all, not vice versa, and so if I am tricking you then I’m clearly not the one being tricked. That however would be the naive viewpoint (which is the viewpoint most of us have) – what we’re not seeing here is that all of society is a game, that all of society (society in its entirety) is a scam, and this includes both the marks (or victims) and those who appear to be coming out on top. The winners are part and parcel of the game just as much as the losers are. Whilst it is the case that the winners believe that they have somehow ‘transcended the game’ (because they have nominally ‘won’ it) they are of course still every bit as much defined by the competition as the losers are. There’s no transcendence in a game, only false transcendence, only ‘transcendence in name’. The ‘scam’ is that we are tricking people into playing a game without telling them that this is what it is but the thing about this is that by ‘doing the tricking’ we are also deceiving ourselves. In the terms of the game, when we successfully exploit (or get the better of) the other players this is called ‘winning’ (which we all understand to be ‘the ultimate good outcome’); in order to get a ‘boost’ (or ‘euphoric uplift’) from winning however we ourselves need to believe in the game – otherwise, our achievement will be meaningless. We think we’re ‘above’ the other players because we’ve proved ourselves to be more skillful at exploiting than they are, but the fact that we are doing all this ‘exploiting’ demonstrates that we’re playing the game too. There is no ‘transcendence’ in a game…
In the game the ‘thing we have to do’ is to trick the other players into believing that the game isn’t a game (which will mean that they will invest in it, which is exactly what we want them to do). This is a kind of Ponzi scheme, therefore. Everything is about concealing the fact that the societal game is only a game (so that all the suckers will invest their entire lives in it); what we don’t see is that the controller is always going to be controlled by their controlling just as much as the controlled is’. If I am successfully controlling you then this feels like I’m in the ‘superior position’; the plain fact of the matter however is that I’m being controlled here just as much as you are – I am being controlled by my need to control you, and that’s the game right there… By convincing you to believe that the game of mutual exploitation isn’t a game (but ‘the way life simply is’, or ‘the way God wants it to be’) I have also convinced myself. I have convinced myself that by playing the game successfully I will attain the benefit, I will attain the ‘top position’ – I have convinced myself that I have ‘transcended the game’, in other words, but as we keep on saying, the key point to understand about ALL games is that transcendence (i.e., winning) is a construct of the game (which means of course that it doesn’t ‘go beyond’ the game). If we saw that there is no such thing as transcendence in this situation then we would no longer be able to play. As James Carse points out, if we saw this then all ‘competitiveness’ would immediately depart from us – what profit is there in ‘viciously competing for an illusion’, after all? Profit itself is the illusion…
We can’t see that our entire way of life, inasmuch as it is based on rules, inasmuch as it is based on ‘precedence’, is a construct. Clearly society is a construct – it’s the result of agreements that we have made and then forgotten about (it’s the result of entropy, in other words). It wouldn’t be there unless we made it be there (and unless we keep on ‘making it be there’). Society – we might therefore say – exemplifies the Big Lie Principle (that we were alluded to earlier) because we aren’t able to make the jump that would need to make in order to ‘see the lie’ (or because we aren’t able to ask the radical question that we would need to ask in order to hear the truth). We can’t question the viewpoint that we’re looking out from because we don’t realize that it’s ‘only a viewpoint’ (which is to say, because we don’t know that our way of seeing the world is ‘a choice that we have freely made’). The only way we’d be able to see this would be if we made this most radical of leaps – the leap of letting go of everything we think we know and then starting totally afresh from nothing. Who’s ever going to do this however – losing everything and then having to start afresh is after all what we call losing!
The ‘jump’ is seeing that game is only a game, that the construct is only a construct. When we are playing the game then there’s absolutely no way for us to see that it can’t be transcended, no way that we could see that what the game presents to us isn’t the actual honest-to-goodness world at all (but only a garden path we’re being led down) and because we can’t see this we will continue to play it, we will continue to invest everything we’ve got in what is an entirely artificial (or ‘made up’) situation. We will continue to play because we still think we can get something out of playing, because we stubbornly insist on thinking that there’s still some juice in this situation that we can extract. We’re infinitely resistant to see that we have reached the end of the road in this regard; we’re infinitely resistant to ‘going back to the drawing board’ and so – as a result – we’ll make sure to ‘stick with what we’ve got’ (even if ‘what we’ve got’ is a pile of shit). This is the Conservative Impulse (which is also known simply as FEAR).
The Social World is thus a perfect example of a trick that is too big, too all-encompassing for us to spot. Will never spot it and we can’t be told it either this is information is just far to disturbing for us. When it comes to little lies, small scale tricks then we’re generally pretty much up to speed that’s what being street smart is all about; When it comes to the big con however then it doesn’t matter how streetwise we might imagine ourselves to be we don’t see it coming and we won’t notice it when it’s here either. It’s an invisible trick therefore and it’s also a dirty one it’s the dirtiest trick ever because we are expected to be grateful when someone comes along and palms us off with a whole heap of utter garbage when the real deal was there all along, free for everyone – young and old, sick and healthy, rich and poor alike. There’s absolutely no need for ‘the Big Rip-Off’ – there’s more than enough for everyone – and yet – given a chance – we unfailingly opt for the ‘scarcity situation’ where – by securing the resource (or rather, the reality supply’) supply – the few manage to get the better of the many, only to come unstuck in the end, only to get ‘stunk out by their own farts’, only to get ‘hoisted by their own petard’. Metaphysically, we are in Dualist territory here (we might say), the oldest known expression of which is Zoroastrianism, a philosophy / religion that regards life as battle between the two complementary powers of Deception and Truth. Robert Charles Zaehner – scholar of Zoroastrianism and Spalding Professor at Oxford University (1952) explains this in terms of the relationship between the Two Sons, Ohrmadz (also known as Ahura Mazda) and Ahiriman –
Ohrmazd created the heavens and the earth and all things that are beautiful and good; but Ahriman created the demons and all that is evil and perverse. Ohrmazd created riches, Ahriman poverty.
