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There’s no solidarity in society…

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There’s no solidarity in society, much as we might like to pretend there is. We simply can’t afford to be honest with ourselves on this point – just as we can’t afford to be honest about a lot of things. To admit to ourselves that far from ‘advancing’ or ‘progressing’ over the centuries and millennia of its existence the human race has achieved a civilisation in which no one – at the end of the day – really cares about anyone else would be just too painful, too ignominious. It would feel too bad. To own up to the truth of the matter – which is that we have cleverly engineered a situation for ourselves in which no one gives a damn about anything apart from their own immediate comfort – is something that we’re just never going to do. In the past we had heroes (or at least the legend of them!) whereas now in the twenty-first century it’s successful narcissists that we look up to instead. We think they have it made, we think they’ve achieved greatness, and so naturally we want that for us too…

We all know – on some level or other – that to feel solidarity with other people (across the board that is, not just with regard to the specific narrow group that we see ourselves as being a member of) is what makes us human, and that the lack of this feeling of solidarity says nothing good about us at all. Even in a culture that idolises power and supremacy over other people there’s a part of us – however dormant – that realises that this isn’t a great situation. We all know deep down that a lack of empathy means a lack of humanity, a lack of there actually being ‘a person’ there. There’s the appearance of a person without the substance. Even if I am non-empathic (in the way that a psychopath is non-empathic) I know one way or another that something is missing. What’s missing is not a small thing either – ‘If you have no sympathy for human pain, the name of human you cannot retain.’ says Saadi.

If I lose the connection with the people around me (which is the sense of connectedness that I have with the wider world around me) then I haven’t just lost ‘the best part of myself’ or ‘an important part of myself’ – I’ve lost everything. I’ve lost the lot. I’ve lost my actual soul, we might say; I have become one of the ‘soulless ones’ – a mere reactive self-interested, self-cherishing, self-contained, societally manufactured ‘unit’. What we’re looking at here – needless to say – is the condition commonly known as narcissism – not to put too fine a point on it, we’re ‘in it for ourselves’ and we don’t give a damn about anyone else. There is of course so much of talk of narcissism these days that the term has become practically meaningless – the way we use it is to denigrate anyone who we perceive as going against us, anyone who doesn’t want to support us, anyone who won’t agree with us, say nice things to us, and so on. This is a similar sort of thing to calling someone ‘selfish’ when they don’t behave in the way we want them to (when they don’t go along with our plans, when they have an agenda that conflicts with ours). When folk don’t go along with us we straightaway get annoyed with them, we angrily denounce them for being ‘selfish’, we experience an instant surge of red-hot righteous indignation that causes us to respond in a toxic fashion… The joke here of course is that we’re blaming the other person for doing what we ourselves are doing. We’re hypocrites, in other words. We are a bunch of selfish people going around indignantly accusing each other of the very fault that we ourselves are consistently manifesting. We are collectively selfish and yet each and every one of us goes around fully convinced that it is everyone else and not us who is the problem. We’re lecturing others when we should be lecturing ourselves…

Social media is – as anyone can see – full of intensely narcissistic people viciously accusing each other of being narcissists, whilst remaining oblivious to the fact that what they’re complaining about is themselves. It’s because we’re so busy demonising others for our own faults that we can’t see them within ourselves (and so there is ‘method behind our madness’). The truth is that this is the way we have been engineered to be, the way that society wants and requires us to be. To end up as a society made up entirely of generic self-deluding narcissists has become our collective fate and – being narcissists – we’re certainly not going to do anything about it. We’re not going to acknowledge the problem. This is the road that we have collectively agreed to go down (or have collectively been tricked to go down) and rather than taking this terrible fact on board, we opt to’ blame the other guy’ and find temporary relief from our pain and frustration this way. We are in fact addicted to finding temporary relief from our pain and frustration in this way – if we weren’t able to displace our misery onto the other guy in the way we love to we simply wouldn’t be able to carry on. Self-deception and the passing on of blame to others (when the fault is ours) is how the system which is society gets to perpetuate and maintain itself – that’s the mechanism involved. The system functions by eating itself, by cannibalising itself, and yet each one of us believes that we will somehow be the exception to this rule, each one of us that we will somehow escape the fate of being eaten when out turn comes up. We believe in our ‘specialness’ and we’ll hang on to this belief to the bitter end.

In order for this to work – in order for there to be ‘buy in’ on our part – the role of the predator, the bully, the abuser, the exploiter, the ‘taker’ has to be reframed in a more positive way. It has to be made not just ‘palatable’, but attractive. It has to be made sexy. We do this by calling the successful bully or exploiter ‘a winner’, we do this by fostering ‘the cult of success’, which is the belief structure that glorifies and glamorises success over everything else. Nothing else counts apart from winning, we say – the end always justifies the means. We don’t care how you got to be a winner, only in the fact that you clearly are! Alternatively, we could say that we engineer buy-in by inventing capitalism (which is the paradigm in which the ultimate motivation in life is the motivation to ‘turn a profit’ – which is just another way of saying that the vice of being selfish or narcissistic has been turned into a virtue). Our interactions in a capitalist world are purely transactional, are based entirely on self-interest (which is to say, ‘devaluing the other’), and when we live according to this paradigm it all seems very normal to us, it seems ‘the way things are supposed to be’. Being brought up – as we have been – within this transactional type of culture means that we’re no longer able to register just how ugly it is. Instead of seeing this way of living life as being repellently ugly, we see it as the only possible way of doing things and we will defend it to the best of our ability. We champion the system that degrades us, we support the environment that denies us.

We like to come out with classic lines like ‘competition brings out the best in us’, or ‘the benefit of competition is that it spurs us on to greater and greater levels of excellence’ (or whatever else), whilst the more down-to-earth (and certainly more truthful) way of putting it would be simply to say – as we just have done – is that the system works by devouring itself. As a collective we ‘succeed to the extent that we fail’ (as Alan Watts puts it) – we ‘gain to the extent that we lose’. Society is a zero- sum game, in other words, and what this means is explained by Wikipedia in the following way – ‘If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero’. The more we push this paradigm – in the hope of increasing profits, in the hope of increasing gain, in the hope of ‘obtaining the personal vindication that we are so desperate for’ – the faster the wheel spins (which is to say, the more voraciously and viciously the serpent proceeds to devours itself). No one does well out of this, naturally enough – the paradigm in which everyone can ultimately be betrayed or sold up the river (since the only thing that matters is personal advantage) appeals to us on one level because we imagine that we can do well for ourselves by throwing everyone else under the bus, but in practise – it is equally disastrous for everyone. We just can’t see that.











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Living In A World That Is ‘Bigger Than We Are’

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Two possibilities exist for us in life – [1] we can exist within a context which is Mythological (or Metaphorical), which means that it isn’t limited by what the Thinking Mind has to say, or [2] we can live our lives within a context which is purely rational, purely literal which is the context provided for us by the thinking mind. The TM – when it comes down to it – can never be any more than a ‘mechanical device’ (albeit a glorified one), which means therefore that to live within the rational or literal picture of the world is to live within ‘mechanically-determined limits’. We live entirely within our idea of what’s real, our theory or belief of what’s real, and this is a very peculiar thing indeed, although we very rarely see just how peculiar it is. We won’t acknowledge anything that can’t be expressed in terms of black and white Aristotelian logic and to say that this is ‘limiting’ is a grand understatement…

Whilst the ‘literal context’ is bounded (which is to say, ‘confined’) since it provides us only with limited possibilities – it’s bounded because it has to take place within the ‘official but at the same time entirely arbitrary’ limits imposed by our conventional view of things – the Mythological Context, on the other hand, is of course unlimited. Who after all can draw a limit around the possibilities that may or may not exist within mythology? We can of course say the same about the possibilities inherent in the Realm of Metaphor – the whole point of a metaphor is that it isn’t limited in the way that a definite ‘statement of fact’ (which is the only thing that the thinking mind can deal in) is. If a statement is metaphorical (or ironic) in its nature then this can mean anything at all, whilst a non-metaphorical statement can only ever mean what it says it means…


We have been living in what we might call the ‘Rational Mode’ for a long time now (two famous names associated with the advent of the new scientific /mechanical paradigm that came into prominence in the seventeenth century being René Descartes and Isaac Newton) and because of this the idea of living within the context of understanding that is purely mythological (and not at all mechanical) tends to sound pretty silly to us; it sounds like something that ignorant superstitious people might do; most of us would definitely have a good laugh at this idea. It’s absurdly fluffy, it’s woolly-headed and ridiculous.  For us – living in the modern, rational era – if a thing isn’t precisely and unambiguously defined then it’s pure fantasy. It’s not scientific, we say. The thing is however that science itself has moved on from the purely rational or mechanical paradigm – which we might call ‘the Paradigm of Certainty’. The Paradigm of Certainty (which is where everything gets defined in a black and white way) reached its climax in the late Nineteenth Century and has since been ‘busted’ as regards its central thesis, which is that everything – including the universe itself – can be understood as being a machine, as being purely mechanical in nature.

We no longer live in a universe made out of absolutes but in a relativistic one, one in which all definite values are only true in relation to the specific framework of reference that we happen to be using at the time (which is a choice, not a ‘given’). What we see is conditioned by the way that we have of seeing it, which is the point Robert Anton Wilson (the author of Quantum Psychology) is making here –

Relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you’re using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which ‘real’ reality can be seen; we’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels.



The relativist view is a slippery one, therefore – it’s so slippery that we can’t grasp it at all, and this is a property of reality that we are profoundly uncomfortable with. We don’t just like to have a non-slippery view of the universe to orientate ourselves towards, we absolutely need it if we are to continue to have a definite view of ourselves – a definite picture of what the world consists of is necessary if we are to have a definite picture of who we are within that world. This is the ‘secret advantage’ we gain from conforming to the rule-based social environment, the ‘unacknowledged advantage’ that we obtain from being members of a rigid and restrictive society –  we get to have a clear and unambiguous definition of who we are and what we should be doing in life. We might complain about society, but at the end of the day we rely on it for our identity (‘identity’ meaning ‘a fixed / unchanging picture of who we are’).  If we want an identity (which we do) then we have to remain obedient to the rules of the agreed-upon social system, we have to continue to put up with being ‘the slaves of other peoples’ opinions’. If we ‘rebel against who we are said to be’, if we ‘break free from the tyranny’, then we lose the rigid black and white idea of who we are, as Jean Baudrillard says here –

It is always the same:once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.



The external authority that is provided for us by society imprisons us – we don’t like to say this out loud but it is nevertheless the unvarnished truth of the matter. We’re prisoners who won’t admit ourselves to be such, slaves who cling to the idea that we are free. Society itself anchors itself to the dominant idea of the time, the Overall Paradigm, and – as we have just said – we have in the last one hundred years undergone a ‘shift’ in paradigm that does not in any way add to our sense of security in the universe. Certainty has been eroded and with it our concrete sense of who we are and what we’re about. It used to be mass religion that did this for us, and then (as has been widely observed) it was science, but now that we have entered the era of what science journalist John Horgan calls ‘ironic science’ – which is to say, science that has recognised the essential relativity of all possible statements, any possible ‘literal understanding’ that we might have of the world – the bottom has fallen out of our nicely regulated lives. Not only is God dead (as Nietzsche tells us) so too is science (or at least, ‘science as we used to understand it’, ‘science as we want to understand it’).

‘The future has arrived – it’s just not evenly distributed yet’, as William Gibson is credited as saying. It’s not the case that the new paradigm – which is the Paradigm of Uncertainty – is something that has impacted the collective mind of humanity – our collective understanding of what constitutes ‘science’ lags far behind the discoveries that have relegated the classic mechanical view of the universe to the status of a ‘special case’ (rather than an all-determining universal framework of understanding). We haven’t caught up yet and we’re in no hurry to do so! The popular understanding of science is best characterised as degenerate scientism –all we want out of our ‘science’ is that it should provide us with validation for what we believe in, so that we don’t ever have to question it, and this is no different to what we required out of religion.  We want an excuse ‘switch off’, we want a system made out of definite answers so that we don’t ever have to engage our brains – so that we can simply ‘coast along’ on automatic… The idea or assumption that this is what science is all about (i.e., providing ontological security) is of course a complete insult to the spirit of science, which is not about ‘finding easy answers to suit our foolish prejudices’. That is what humanity has always done, and the philosophy of science arose precisely to challenge this mental laziness. That’s what distinguishes science from mere ‘bias confirmation’.

Even in the world of science itself we find deeply entrenched prejudices (in the way that we think about things) as Rupert Sheldrake has argued in The Science Delusion. The philosopher of science Herbert Dingle goes so far as to say the following –

It is ironical that, in the very field in which Science has claimed superiority to Theology, for example—in the abandoning of dogma and the granting of absolute freedom to criticism—the positions are now reversed. Science will not tolerate criticism of special relativity, while Theology talks freely about the death of God, religionless Christianity, and so on.


The profound unflinching equanimity that is required of us if we are to be worthy of the mantle of genuine practitioners of science (rather than being ‘mere practitioners of materialistic scientism’ – which is ‘science as a belief system’ – is beyond (it would seem fair to say) all but a very few of those who make a living in this field. True science is more like mysticism in that it has nothing to do with beliefs. Materialistic scientism is essentially nothing more than a belief in rationality as the ultimate guide to what is real and what is not. The ‘ontological security’ that we gain here derives from our unreflective (or uncritical) belief in the impermeable nature of our thought-created boundaries (which is the very same thing as a belief in logic as an actual descriptor of reality) and this is precisely what makes what we’re doing scientism rather than science. This is very clearly a major ‘flaw’ – it is hopelessly naïve for us to unreflectively believe in boundaries in this way, and yet still call this ‘science’. Ultimately, there are no boundaries – this is just a convention we adopt for the sake of convenience.

To live in what we have called a ‘mythological context’ is not to be contained within the assumed boundaries of thought; it is to live life in an open rather than a closed way. The significance of living within the rational (or literal) context is that we are living in a world that is the same size as we are (since everything that happens to us is interpreted by the very same rational formula, is processed via the very same mental categories). Our overall ‘paradigm’ never gets challenged; whatever it is that we experience always has to be squeezed into ‘the rational straight jacket’. This is ‘nothing-but-ism’ -whenever something happens that we can’t explain we straightaway say that it’s ‘nothing but this’ or ‘nothing but that’ with the end result that absolutely nothing is ever allowed to be there that doesn’t obey the basic rules governing our ‘mental simulation of reality’. The end result – in other words – is where we get to live in a world that is the same size as we are (or the same size as the cage of our rational thinking) and this is a tautology, this is a null domain.  To be real – we have to live in a world that is bigger than we are, a mythological realm -so to speak – and this is something that we are simply too fearful to do. Fear causes our world to shrink to the point where there is no ‘adventure’ in it (as Joseph Campbell might say) and if there’s no adventure in it then there’s no meaning in it, no life in it, no anything in it.









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Simulated Mental Health [2]

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Simulated mental health is – we might say – ‘the mental health of who we are in the simulation’; it is ‘the mental health belonging to the simulated version of us’, and this of course means that it is going to be a totally different thing from our actual mental health, our actual well-being. This is hardly an unfamiliar notion – what we’re talking about here is akin to the health of our avatar in a role-playing game such as World of Warcraft. Success in the tasks that are required of us by the game adds to our health, whilst a lack of success will detract from it – what we’re playing for is our very existence, in other words. Our well-being or integrity in the game is completely dependent upon our efficacy in accomplishing tasks, therefore. When we succeed in all of the tasks we have been set then this equals that thing which we call <winning> and winning represents the maximum wellness which it is possible to achieve in the game; failure to do what is required of us, on the other hand, is where our health bar runs down lower and lower until it eventually falls to zero. That’s us finished at this point, therefore – we have then officially lost.

We couldn’t really expect anything else from a game; winning is the ultimate ‘good thing’, the ultimate ‘beneficial outcome’, whilst losing is the antithesis of this. This is an explicitly bipolar situation. It’s not that there’s any gain or loss outside of the game of course, but by immersing ourselves in the game it gets to feel very real to us. If it didn’t feel so real then we wouldn’t bother playing it, obviously – what would be the point? Whether we’re talking about ‘a game that we know we’re playing’ or ‘a game we absolutely don’t know to be a game’ makes no difference; it’s the same situation in both cases, which is – we might say – it is a heteronomous situation. We’re being controlled (or ‘determined’) from the outside and we’re just going along for the ride.

A game creates a heteronymous state of being whether we know we’re playing it or not. This is the very definition of a game – it is activity which takes place in accordance with a particular set of rules that have been assumed, that have been agreed upon. In the psychological sphere, we can say that it’s where we are – [1] Being totally controlled by a bunch of rules, and where [2] We jump on board with these rules so that we don’t see them as an imposed upon us, so that we don’t see them as something that we are being controlled by. We align ourselves with the rules, in other words, and what this means is that they immediately become invisible to us. The rules get incorporated into our way of understanding the world. Society is the prime example of this sort of thing – we don’t experience ourselves as being strong-armed every step of the way, as being without any agency ourselves, even though this is exactly what is happening. We have bought into the rules and – as a result of this – we don’t even know there are any rules there; on the contrary, everything seems to be exactly as it should be; everything seems hunky-dory. We don’t perceive ourselves as being controlled, in other words; instead, we perceive ourselves to be perfectly autonomous. This is why being ‘unconscious’ gives rise to smugness, to complacency, to arrogance…

As Professor James Carse says, we freely agree to give up our freedom to the game – if we didn’t ‘freely agree’ to give up our freedom to the game then we couldn’t play it. ‘No one can play who is forced to play,’ says James Carse. If I am a gamer, and I am playing some kind of RPG, then it goes without saying that I have ‘agreed to play’; I simply wouldn’t be there otherwise. If I didn’t feel like playing then I’d simply go and find something else to do instead. I’d walk the dog, or go fishing, or watch TV, or whatever. In a game such as Gears of War or GTA, I do know that this isn’t real life but at the same time I experience a high degree of immersion. That’s where the fun comes in, as we have said; it comes from ‘suspending our disbelief’, so to speak. Society is different however because – inasmuch as we don’t consciously decide to play – we don’t know that we are doing so. Society is a ‘total environment’, we might say, which means that we can’t ever leave it. Even if we head out into the wilderness and leave our phone and laptop behind, we’re still bringing our society along with us in the form of the conditioning in our heads. Our very identity is founded upon social conditioning and so if we did want to leave the security of the social game behind, we’d also have to leave our identity behind as well (which isn’t something we want to do). Because the social game constitutes the whole world to us we are extraordinarily unlikely ever to question it. If someone were to tell us that we’re not autonomous, but that we are merely ‘playing our part in the game’, we just wouldn’t believe it. We are ‘heteronomous without knowing it’, therefore – we imagine that we’re ‘fulfilling our will’ (and thus feel good or bad depending on whether we succeed or not) whilst the truth is that we’re utterly passive and are being ‘acted upon by mechanical rules’.

The ‘next level up’ in terms of the invisibility of the rules that we are obeying is more subtle, more insidious still. There will always be a going to be a small proportion of people who remain unadapted to society (for whatever reason), and who – because of this – have the chance therefore to see the bias for what it is. [When we are playing a game this means that we can’t see it to be a game, when we’re adapted to the system then we can’t know it to be a system]. It is from this small, ‘discounted’ section of the population that our original thinkers (artists, poets, ground-breaking scientists, philosophers, etc.,) come from, those people who are the source of new ways of looking at life. No one was ever responsible for ‘breathing new life into a stagnant cultural milieu’ as a result of studiously agreeing with everyone else. It’s society’s rejects and misfits who do this, not the so-called ‘pillars of society’, not the so-called ‘responsible adults’.

Joseph Campbell talks about this in The Hero with a Thousand  Faces – every one of us will – at some point in our lives – receive ‘the call’ to venture out from the safety of the Equilibrium Realm (where the world is what we collectively agree for it to be, where our core assumptions about reality are continuously being confirmed by the edited information that’s coming back to us) and we respond to call (rather than ignoring it) then we will find ourselves in a situation where there is great peril, but also the chance of returning from our adventures to the everyday world with the ‘magical healing elixir’ that this poor world of ours needs so badly. This then is ‘The Task of the Hero’ – to forsake the superficially comfortable but sterile life that we had and venture into a strange unearthly ‘magical realm’ where very real dangers will be waiting for us, dangers that come with no guarantee that we will survive them – and then returning the Equilibrium World – the world where everyone agrees with everyone else out of fear of being different – with a treasure not for our own sake, but for everyone else, for those that ‘stayed at home’.

The treasure – sometimes spoken of as the Elixir of Immortality in myths and legends – is a medicine that can benefit or heal the folk we had to leave behind when we embarked upon our journey (the folk who do not – out of fear – admit that there actually is something beyond the suffocating confines of the consensus reality. If it were not for these heroes (who did not heed the warnings and prohibitions of their conservative ‘peer-group’) things would be very grim indeed for us; left to our own ‘incestuous‘ devices, we would unfailingly suffocate ourselves with our own rules and regulations, with our relentless, across-the-board conservatism and rejection of anything new. We need help but we’re not able to help ourselves because we’re afraid to see the truth. Nothing in the Equilibrium World is ‘real’, after all – it’s only what we say is real, and so something from beyond this convenient comfort zone is needed, something from a realm we won’t even acknowledge as being there, never mind give up our ordinary, ‘safe’ lives to plunge into it.

We can draw an interesting parallel here with what we might call ‘generic mental health care’ and the way in which we seek to treat the neurotic mental health conditions (from which we are increasingly suffering) with yet more of the very thing that is causing them. What lies at the root of our malaise is psychological risk avoidance (which in practise translates as life avoidance, as any psychotherapist would tell you) and this ‘playing it safe’, this ‘automatic agreeing with everyone else’ – type behaviour is collective, is something we all collude in without ever acknowledging that there is any sort of collusion there.

The social system is a trap that we create for ourselves by only allowing ourselves to think in the way that has been agreed upon by everyone else in the trap. We are always dependent on how ‘someone else’ sees us therefore, we never get to be independent. We actually are what everyone else sees us as being, so how can this not be a trap?  A collusion is the kind of a thing that we can enter into with the greatest of ease, but which can’t exited from in the same easy way. It’s the Hotel California. We collude by agreeing upon unspoken rules, but as soon as we do that, as soon as we do agree, then we can no longer see what it is that we have agreed with. <Agreeing> means ‘accepting without question’, it means ‘taking stuff for granted’. To take a whole bunch of stuff for granted without knowing what it is that we’ve taken for granted means that we are now the prisoners of this stuff; we’re prisoners of ‘the unwarranted assumptions that have been collectively made and then instantly disregarded, instantly ‘forgotten about’ and thus we don’t get to realise that we are prisoners. This is our situation when we buy into the Great Collusion, therefore – ‘None are so hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free’, says Goethe.

The social collusion is a trap because the only way we can get to be part of it is if we can’t see that we are. This is ‘the Kingdom of the Blind’. The argument that we’re putting forward here is that the general malaise which we are afflicted with (as a result of being in a closed system that we can’t see to be such) can only be cured by ‘by bringing something in from the outside’. ‘A problem can’t be solved with the very same thinking that created it’, says Albert Einstein. The big problem here being that – collectively – we won’t admit that there is ‘an outside’. We don’t admit that there is an outside (something outside of the Formal Realm which we have created) and so we certainly won’t admit that this is a place where help can come from. This is true both on the personal and the collective level; as the often-quoted quote from Joseph Campbell has it, ‘The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek’.

We don’t acknowledge anything apart from our own thinking and so if someone comes along who hasn’t signed up to all of our unacknowledged assumptions, we won’t listen to them. They aren’t in the club and so what they say doesn’t count; we’ll dismiss them, exclude them, laugh at them, stone-wall them, demonise them, etc., and yet these ignored or dismissed folk are the only ones who can help us. They represent ‘the missing ingredient’. Testing ourselves, the risk of looking at things in a new and unverified way. The cause of our malaise is our chronic aversion to having the boat rocked, our chronic aversion admitting that we really don’t know what’s going on, and yet this admission – the candid admission that we aren’t actually ‘experts’ at all – is the only thing that can help us. Humility is the only thing that can help us. Going back to the drawing board is the only thing that can help us and that’s precisely what we don’t want to do. We’d rather carry on believing that ‘the professionals’ (who represent the unimpeachable Authority of the System) absolutely DO know what they’re doing and that – therefore – we are in ‘safe hands’…








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Sense Comes From The Inside, Not The Outside…

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Sense comes from the inside, it comes from ‘the inside out’; what comes from ‘the outside in’ isn’t good sense (or even anything remotely resembling it) but rather it is brainwashing, conditioning, ideology, and so on. It’s the ‘biased account’. The one direction is honest, healthy and sound whilst the other is malign and profoundly unsound — nothing good ever came out of letting some external agency direct us with regard to how we see the world.

Instead of ‘sense’ we could talk of wisdom and say that there is only one place that wisdom can come from and that’s the sovereign individual — it can’t be piped in from the outside, it can’t be taught by teachers or learnt in online seminars. It doesn’t come from schools and universities. If our only source of knowledge about the world originates from ‘the outside of us’ then it’s not wisdom that we’re talking about here but a false or contrived narrative. It’s propaganda, it’s advertising, it’s promotional material for the dysfunctional Artificial World that has been brutally foisted upon us from a very early age. Knowledge and power are inseparable, as Foucault points out — those with the power are the one’s who say what is knowledge and what isn’t. That’s why power attracts us — because that way lies ‘impunity’.

When our understanding of things has been systematised (by the proper authorities) and piped into us from some ‘external store’ then this isn’t wisdom but — on the contrary — it is a disguised control system, a self-consistent structure of lies cunningly designed to subvert authentic insight. When sense comes from the inside (in a natural way) then this frees, when it comes from the outside — and is forced upon us — it imprisons. The principle here is nothing if not simple: when our way of understanding the world and our part in it comes from inside then there is clarity and when it comes from the outside then what we have instead is fundamental confusion. This is the fundamental confusion that comes from treating an illusion as if it were real, the fundamental confusion that comes about when we are browbeaten from an early age into believing some kind of crassly stupid narrative about ‘what’s going on’ (and thereby get bullied into turning our backs on the connection to the truth that we already have, the direct connection that we don’t need some external agency to provide us with).

Only slavery, confusion and illusion can result when our ‘sense of what’s what’ (our grasp on ‘what everything’s about’) has to be imported from the outside, and this is precisely the situation that we currently find ourselves in — everything does come from the outside. We’ve been brought up to believe that we don’t need an ‘inside’, that we don’t need an interior source of wisdom that can’t be tampered with (or contaminated by) any control systems. The door to the inside is locked and bolted and we’ve been trained from childhood not to go there, not to look there, not to trust anything that doesn’t come with the official stamp of approval. We have been trained to not even know that the doorway is there — we have been taught to doubt our own insight, to have misgivings about anything that doesn’t accord with the ‘official line’. We have been made to feel ashamed of ourselves when we don’t believe and uphold the official line — how could we be so ungrateful as to bite the hand that feeds us? We experience ‘loyalty to the lie’ and this means ‘not seeing the lie as a lie’…

None of this is accidental — the only way the arbitrary / artificial world that we inhabit can survive (and thrive) is if we unconditionally accept it as the sole legitimate authority. ‘The Lord thy God is a jealous God’, so we read in Exodus 34:24. We might think of the Doctrine of Original Sin (which the church has used to alienate us from our own good sense for the last few thousand years) or we could think in terms of the early Church Father’s insistence on dianoia (as opposed to epinoia) — dianoia being when our ‘knowing’ is of the officially validated or sanctioned type. dianoia can be defined as ‘correct thinking’ (‘correct’ according to the Presiding Authority, that is). Epinoia, on the other hand (which is also called gnosis) is as Elaine Pagels tells us — a direct unique connection with the truth that is not provided by others, which doesn’t come via a self — serving intermediary. Other people can’t provide us with the unique and direct connection with the truth — naturally enough! ‘Someone else’s truth is a lie’ (as Jung says somewhere); authority is slavery for everyone who is subject to it (which is something Krishnamurti never tires of pointing out). To live our lives in accordance with how someone else says we should be living it is not to live — this is a parody or mockery of life, a ‘perverse inversion of the natural order’…

Other people can’t provide us with the unique connection to the truth — they can only control us so that ‘we think what they want us to think’. The so-called ‘correct’ interpretation is the interpretation that the external authority (which is to say, the dominant culture) wants us to make. Whatever it is that we see and understand to be true is the result of external manipulation and nothing more. This is an astonishing thing to become aware of, an utterly bizarre thing to become aware of — how on earth can someone else’s ‘doing’ be responsible for this sense that I have of being me? How can my sense of identity (which seems to be the most intimate perception of reality that I have) be ‘the result of regulation’ (or ‘the output of a machine’)? ‘Me’ means that it’s not someone else, after all, so if my sense of being me (and no one else) is the result of external control then this turns everything on its head. How can control the control of perception and the control of the thinking process results in this thing we call identity? It turns out that ‘identity’ is a trick that is played on us, a trick that works by controlling (or limiting) what we are able to be aware of, and the result of being fooled in this way is that we end up — as we’ve already said — being (perversely) loyal to our captor, loyal to our abuser, and just as long as our ‘understanding’ comes from the outside, this will remain our situation. We’re doing all the work here, no one else…

We do a thing — which is to say, we act as if some proposition or other were true when it isn’t — and then we take the fact that we are, with 100% consistency, acting as if the thing in question were true (when it isn’t), and then use this super-consistent behaviour to say (or rather imply) that there must be something there necessitating it. I act (for example) as if a lamppost were there when it isn’t and then walk studiously around it every time I’m going in that direction and then I infer from this — in an unstated (or ‘inconspicuous’) kind of a way — that what I’m at such pains to avoid must actually be there. Why else would I be avoiding it, after all? This logic (which is — we might say — ‘the superficial logic of appearances’) only convinces when we take pains to remain as shallow as possible. Being superficial on a full time basis — doesn’t feel very nice (it’s a source of suffering), but we’re prepared to ignore this ‘cost’ in order to maintain the illusion that we are so attached to (which is ‘the illusion of reality being what we think it is rather than otherwise’).

The illusion is thus produced by our own inattention to what we are doing. It’s not that we are ‘creating the illusion’ therefore, but rather that we — [1] ‘paint the picture that we want to see’, and then [2] neglect to see that this is what we have done. This isn’t in any way a ‘creative process’, therefore; the production of the ‘positive’ (or ‘generic’) reality isn’t an act of creation but — on the contrary, the result of an act of systematic inattention…. We create plausible illusions (which is to say, ‘illusions that super-effectively trap us within them’) by ignoring the bigger picture (the ‘bigger picture’ that includes our own participation in engineering the illusion) and it is this collapsing of perspective that result in the unhappy situation where ‘we have an outside but not an inside’. We thus think about everything in a back-to-front way (as Jung notes) — I’m not happy, so I fix a smile on my face and keep up with the positive thinking until hopefully it takes. Deep down (where I can’t go) I am shaky, fearful and unsure of anything and so I put all the emphasis on being ‘dogmatically certain’ on the outside. Then — when I’ve done this — I can point to the veneer, I can point to the behaviour, and declare that I actually am sure of myself, infer that I actually do know what I’m doing.

In short, I can’t control the inside (because the inside, we might say, is made up of ‘what’s really happening’ — not ‘what I’m artificially causing to happen’) but I can — up to a point — [1] Control how I appear on the outside and then [2] Conflate the inside with the outside so that ‘the pretence’ becomes ‘the actual’. This collapsing of the original indeterminate situation (which equals ‘conflating the outside with ‘the inside’ means that the inside disappears from view. Reality has been ‘murdered’, in other words. When I imply that ‘the outside is the inside’ then what’s happening here is that I am (indirectly) saying that there is no inside; I’m saying (without coming out and openly saying anything) that ‘what you see is all there is’ and so this is therefore where the ‘neglect’ that we have been talking about comes in. Neglect is what lies behind the conflation of ‘appearance’ and ‘essence’; systematic inattention is what results in us living in the ‘Shell World’, which is the world that is made up entirely of ‘the outside’ even though there is no such thing as ‘the outside’…





Image credit — nottelevision.net

The ‘Dirtiest Trick Ever’…

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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.






Stuck To The Script

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Our everyday, common-or-garden type of consciousness is 100% stuck. it is stuck to the map, stuck to the model, stuck to the doctrine, stuck to the blueprint (or narrative) that we have been given. Our consciousness doesn’t exist independently, in other words, it exists in a state of bondage, in a state of subjugation – only it’s a state of subjugation that we perceive backwards (because of the absolute lack of perspective in this situation) as honest-to-goodness volitional existence.

Consciousness in a state of subjugation is the only type of consciousness we know, and for this reason we don’t feel that it is in any way compromised, in any way unfree, in any way peculiar or suspicious. Everything seems to be just as it should be (and if we did come across ‘free consciousness’ our automatic reaction would almost certainly be to try to shut it down. Awareness that isn’t in the service of the thinking mind is a dangerous aberration, we would say, and it constitutes a situation that needs fixing and fixing fast. We might have to refer the person concerned (whether it’s ourselves or someone else) to the mental health services.

Our everyday consciousness is the furthest away from being independent that it possibly could be. It follows the contour lines that are provided for it by logic; it adheres scrupulously to the logical surface that thought supplies, that thought generates by its activity. This is the same as ‘following a script’ – when we follow a script then it isn’t necessarily obvious that we are, we could be speaking quite spontaneously. Who’s to say that we aren’t? The problem with relying on a script (rather than trusting to our own natural spontaneity) is of course that it’s ridiculously rigid and can only work in an environment that is equally rigid, equally predictable, and which we have been specifically calibrated to operate within.

So – in other words – if I’m ‘running off a script, and you’re ‘running off a script’ too, and if the two scripts dovetail perfectly together (i.e., if they’re not two different stories), then no one looking on would be able to tell that everything is actually ‘running on rails’ and not free-flowing at all. On the contrary, it will seem perfectly legitimate; it will seem perfectly spontaneous. This is how it works in society therefore – we’re making moves in a game that we don’t know to be ‘moves in a game’. Society (or any other social group) is ‘a game that does not declare itself to be such’ – it’s a game that we believe to be entirely free, entirely unscripted. This isn’t to say that everything we do or say has been predetermined; we have a type of freedom here (albeit a trivial type) and this is ‘the freedom to choose whatever flavour of chewing gum we want’ (just as long as you buy the gum), or ‘the freedom to pay now or pay in instalments’ (just as long as you pay). The only type of choice we have here is Hobson’s choice, therefore…

The type of autonomy we possess in the game of the self is theatrical; we perform the theatre of being a genuinely spontaneous person but behind the free and easy performance everything is carefully scripted, rigidly scripted. By throwing ourselves into the act we get to believe in the story ourselves, (which is essential if we are to continue to play the part and yet believe that we aren’t playing a part) but in order to be able to immerse ourselves in the game in this way we have to ‘go the whole hog’, we have to commit 100%, we have to allow ourselves to be absolutely restricted to the viewpoint that is being provided for us by the game, and this means that we have straightaway incur an entropy debt, which is another way of saying that we have forgotten that this viewpoint is a choice, that we have forgotten that we don’t have to look at things this way (and carry on as a result as if this absurd little mechanical dance were all there were to life). Open-ended awareness has vanished from the scene and all there is in its place is this script, this template that we have to copy, this determinate reality that has us locked in to a rigid path, along with the inversion of perception that causes us to experience this state of absolute slavery as ‘us freely or volitionally living our life’. This is – we might say – the ‘reversed miracle’ of Conditioned Existence.







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The Humpty Dumpty Show

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What we don’t realise about this whole business of so-called ‘mental health’, which we mistakenly (and ridiculously) imagine ourselves to know all about, is that Humpty Dumpty has to go. He has to lose his balance – he has to be toppled from his vantage point and whether this happens by accident or design doesn’t matter. We absolutely don’t see that Humpty Dumpty has to fall, that is his job to fall, that this is how the process has to start (the only way in which it can start) – via a disturbance to the equilibrium state that can’t be rectified or damped down after the event. There has to be a ‘runaway fluctuation’ before anything meaningful can happen, before any actual ‘mental healthiness’ can come about. In short, Chaos – which we don’t at all like – is a necessary ingredient for growth (and without growth there is clearly going to be no mental health).

Instead of seeing this, we get it all backwards and solemnly say that Humpty Dumpty has to be saved, no matter what the cost. Saving Humpty Dumpy is what it’s all about. We do our best to make sure he never does have that fall, and if (or when) he does, then we go all out and trying to put him back together again. Mental health – for us – is all about preserving Humpty Dumpty and ensuring that he never does take a tumble from his comfortable niche on the wall. We want to avoid all risks, we want to make him as comfortable as possible. We manage the situation, in other words, and ‘managing the situation’ means sticking like glue to the equilibrium values, no matter what. Mixing our metaphors here, it means trying to make sure that nothing rocks the boat or – if it does – it means that we can get the situation under control again as quickly as possible. The Humpty Dumpty show mustn’t be interrupted, not under any circumstances…

What’s going on here of course is that we’re seeing Humpty Dumpty as being a final state, an optimal position, a ‘terminal destination’, which is like saying that a tadpole or caterpillar doesn’t need to change any further, that they represent an organism at the end stage in development. It is like ‘sticking’ with the hand of cards the hand in a game of pontoon because we’re gambling that it’s the winning hand. We are sticking with what we have been given rather than taking a risk on it, rather than saying ‘twist’ to the dealer; we’re all about conservation, we’re all about ‘holding onto whatever it is that we’ve got’ (rather than throwing it back into the pot and taking a chance with what comes next, if indeed anything ever does). As E.F. Schumacher says in his book A Guide to the Perplexed, we’re convinced that our ‘greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter acorns’. It’s Acorn City all the way – we neither know nor care anything about oak trees. We scoff and sneer and say that ‘oak trees’ are a myth, a fairy story. We arrest people who talk about such things…

The principle that we’re talking about here goes back a long way of course – it’s hardly what we might call a ‘modern’ or ‘new-fangled’ idea! In John 12:24 we read,

Verily, verily I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth match fruit.

In medieval alchemy we come across the famous motto solve et coagula, which indicates that whatever has been achieved in the work must then be thrown back into the acid bath and returned to its constituent elements before the next step in the Alchemical Opus can be taken. This constitutes a radical break with what we might call ‘the law of accumulation’, which is the default law, which is the only law most of us know. If we don’t risk it then we lose it anyway, in other words. If we don’t give it away voluntarily then it will be taken off us against our will, to our very great discomfiture, later on in the proceedings. Logically – of course – it makes no sense whatsoever to ‘let go of what we have gained’, to risk the certain in favour of the completely uncertain. We’d be seen as mad to do this. When we are operating in Mechanical Mode – which is to say, when everything we do is purposeful and rational, when everything we do is done for a reason – then we will always stick with what we’ve got, we will always shun the risk and play it safe in this case. We will always have the wrong idea about mental health; we will always view it in a closed way as ‘optimization with regard to a specific environment’ rather than seeing it in an open way as ‘a journey towards Wholeness’ (which – unlike optimization – is not a journey towards a specific goal).

The Mechanical Mind cannot – by virtue of its nature – ever understand what ‘genuine mental health’ might look like and that’s our problem. Our problem is that we have never being able to get past the deliberations of this rule-based mind; that’s the limit beyond which we cannot go, and because of this shortsightedness our interpretation of mental health, our ‘reckoning’ with regard to what this means, is always going to be centred upon either saving Humpty Dumpty (so he never has a fall) or doing our level best to fix him up as good as new after he does. Our endeavours in this respect are always going to be in conservative mode, in ‘backwards-looking mode’ – our ingenuity and technological resources are going to be dedicated to the task of either ‘preventing what can’t be prevented’, or ‘fixing what can’t be fixed’. Whatever temporary (or limited) success we might have in this unrealistic endeavour is always going to be to our ultimate detriment therefore – there’s no way that it can’t be.

We could argue – if we wanted to – that mental health is we define it as being and that if we wish to adapt ourselves to an artificial or contrived environment then we can and so for us MH will be the measure of how effectively we are able to do this. ‘Mental wellness’ and ‘adaptation to the system’ are conflated, in other words. In this case, our interest is always going to be in optimizing adaptation within a Finite World that has been designed specifically to support acorns, to protect them from risk, to promote their interests, and so on and so forth, and no one is going to find fault with this scheme of things, no one is going to see the utterdisaster that this short-sighted approach will turn into. Only a small minority of us are going to remain unconvinced by this argument, which means that we can of course very easily dismiss them as being eccentrics or cranks or mentally ill people (or whatever else). This is therefore the Model of the Mental Health that we have settled for – what we have done is to ‘optimise the Designed Environment for the life of the acorn’, which means that we are using that Designed Environment as a measuring stick to assess how mentally healthy we are or are not. If we adapt well to our situation, and appear to function well within it, then we are regarded as being mentally healthy, and if we don’t – if we fail to thrive – then we are understood to be suffering from some kind of problem (mental health wise) which in turn means that we require some sort of ‘social adjustment therapy’, as Alan Watts calls it. We need to be fixed – linear interventionism is required so that we can ‘get back on track’.

This is all a ridiculous joke, however; we’ve created a kind of Humpty Dumpty Disneyland – a kind of sanitised, risk-free, highly regulated habitat for the artificial pseudo-entity (the pseudo-entity we are symbolically referring to in this discussion as ‘Humpty Dumpty’), an artificial habitat which is optimised for our hero never have to have any unfortunate accidents like falling off a log wall perhaps. Our measure of what constitutes ‘health’ or ‘well-being’ makes perfect sense to us therefore from the acorn’s perspective, but this is only because we’ve got caught up in a loop of logic; that is only because everything has been provided for us by the very system that we are supposedly assessing. The system is evaluating itself; the system is investigating itself and then – on the strength of this investigation – giving itself a clean bill of health. We’ve got no perspective on the matter, in other words; if we did have a bit of perspective than what seems perfectly logical and sensible (which is to say, defining mental wellness in terms of how well we are thriving within an artificial system) would be revealed as being the most frightful mistake ever. It’s ‘the most frightful mistake ever’ because it neatly sets us up to be bullied and exploited by an abusive regime that we mistakenly see as being our friend…

There isno mental health, no integrity in a ‘loop of logic’ (which is to say, ‘in a view of the world which holds together via the tactic of constantly reaffirming its own arbitrary assumptions’. No sort of mental health can be found here, only self-deception, only the systemized avoidance of truth. The Designed World may contain the illusion of health and well-being, the illusion of growth, the illusion of happiness and fulfilment, etc., but existing in the heteronomous (or ‘passively-identified’) state of mind in which we are constantly falling for the manufactured illusion that we are happy and that our lives are meaningful, that we’re absolutely on the right track as regards this business of ‘life and how to live it’ just because we’re copying the given template, and so on, is of course a profound malaise in the first place. Believing what is not true to be wholesome and valuable and worth protecting is the worst malaise or affliction there is. To be separated from the truth and being proud of this separation, being cocky or arrogant about it, being downright smug about it, is the most unwholesome mind state that is possible to be in. This is toxic ignorance, this is avidya – the root of all our ills which we can’t be persuaded to relinquish.

There isn’t any type of mental health (or ‘integrity’) in the generic, ten-a-penny idea that we have of ourselves – which is the ‘pseudo-entity’ Humpty Dumpty that we’ve been speaking of. We place a lot of hope in him, we place all the hope we’ve got in him but that hope, that fanatical belief (and all the investment that goes with it) is never going to come good for us. Instead of saying that there is ‘no mental health in the pseudo-entity known as Humpty Dumpty’ , we could say that there is no Wholeness – there’s no Wholeness in a vacuous, self-negating loop of logic, there is no Wholeness in the Linearity, and so no matter what sophisticated medical interventions we might make (on behalf of Mr H. Dumpty) we are never going to be able to change this basic fact. The only thing that’s ever going to bring about Wholeness is the thing that we don’t want to happen – which is the accident (the ‘Fall’) to which the well-known nursery rhyme refers. The only chance we have for growth and change is if our hero is allowed to fall from the wall where he was sitting and meet his end on the unforgiving grounds below. The key thing here is Wei-Wu (or not doing) – the key element here (in the Negative Path) is not trying to ‘put Humpty Dumpty back together again’, and that just happens to be the hardest thing there is. We’re great for the positive doing (which comes down to unconscious reflex-type behaviour) but absolutely no good at all for negative doing (which is to say, ‘consciously not going along with the pattern of thinking and behaving that is being imposed on us’).

Life isn’t about consolidating our position – that’s not life, that’s the avoidance of life. Reaffirming our current position as being ‘the one and only right one’ (and not being interested in ‘what happens next’) is how we put off the moment when we actually have to start living (rather than just thinking about it or talking about it). ‘Life avoidance’ means being orientated to keeping things the same (no matter what price we will have to pay for this); it means that we are constantly trying to return to the state of blissful ignorance which is the ‘prior situation’. The prior situation (i.e., the situation that prevails before Humpty jumps or is pushed) corresponds to the ‘world egg’ that Herman Hess is talking about here in this quote from his novel Damien –

The bird fights his way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who must be born who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is abraxas.

‘Destroying the world’ doesn’t sound particularly great to us – it doesn’t sound good at all. We’re very much attached to the world. Rather than fighting our way out of the egg, we put all our energy into fighting to get back into it – we put all our resources into figuring out ingenious ways by which we might return to the comfort of the ‘preborn state’. We’re driven by ‘nostalgia for an illusion’, or ‘nostalgia for an ideal state that never existed’, rather than being orientated towards the world as it is, the world that exists outside of the egg, outside of the artificial situation. We are essentially ‘equilibrium seekers’ (or equilibrium dwellers) and we are frightened of anything that might come along to disturb our sleep. We’re holding on to what we know, even though ‘what we know’ is only a fantasy. When we talk about ‘mental health’ therefore we’re really talking about that sterile state of existence in which nothing does disturb or disrupt us, that state of being which is really nothing more than an idea or notion that we have – an idea or nothing which is as compulsively attractive to us as it is because it represents a successful escape from any sort of ontological challenge, anything that might lead to us having to let go of our ‘deeply-familiar-but-totally-deluded’ way of seeing the world. We’re yearning for an escape from the challenge that life makes on us (which is something that just isn’t possible, no matter how much we may want it) and we frame this avoidant (or ‘reality-denying’) mentality as being ‘mentally healthy’, as being ‘the way we should all be’…







Image credit – blogs.loc.gov/folklife/

Trying To ‘Please The System’

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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


Making A Wish…

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When we’re patient then (in time!) everything will be revealed to us but when we’re impatient then nothing is revealed to us – not ever. The thing about this is that patience is strictly ‘an old-fashioned virtue’ and it’s not considered to be ‘a thing’ anymore; instead, we believe in instant gratification (as is often pointed out). In one way we believe in instant gratification because it’s in our nature to do so; it’s also true to say – however – that we believe in it because we have been sold the idea by our culture, because we have been educated to be that way. Acting on our impulses is highly beneficial for the economy whilst the ability to not act would spell financial ruin. ‘Greed is good’, as the line in the film goes.

Alan Watts observes that everything about our technologically orientated culture has to do with ‘shortening the gap between where we are and where we’d like to be’. Transport is a literal example of this sort of thing – in order to get from one town to another we once had to either walk, or travel by horse and cart, which was of course a very slow business. Now, we can travel by high-speed train. Within a decade or so (if we continue uninterrupted on our present course) then hypersonic stratospheric shuttles will be the thing. The development of information technology is probably the most dramatic example of this tendency to keep on shortening the gap (the gap in question being the one between ‘asking the question’ and ‘getting the answer’). We used to do computations in our fingers, then we moved onto the abacus, and now we have vast arrays of computer cores and the so-called ‘evolution’ of artificial intelligence. Our number-crunching ability is increasing logarithmically, and the reason this is so important to us is because it helps us to get what we want more quickly and more effectively, and that is where all the money is.  Giving people what they want faster than anyone else can is an unfailing recipe for success.

This isn’t to say that technology is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, that it is either beneficial to us or detrimental, simply that it can be used to facilitate the demand that we have within us to make things happen quicker. It’s not so much that we value technology because it can improve the quality of our lives therefore but because it enables us to dramatically shorten the interval between ‘the wish’ and ‘the fulfilment of this wish’. It seems quite reasonable to imagine that – as some point in the future – the ‘uncomfortable interval’ (during which we have to wait and drum our fingers on the table) will be eliminated altogether and that our wishes will be instantaneously fulfilled…

We might (naively) think that this would constitute a tremendous achievement for humankind and that a world where our desires are instantly manifested for us via super-advanced technology would be as close to utopia as we would ever want to get. It’s not as quite as simple as this, of course – all we need to do is think of all those fairy stories where somebody is granted three wishes by a powerful genie or spirit to realise that this can also easily turn into a recipe for hell on earth rather than being a recipe for utopia (or we could think of the classic science fiction film Forbidden Planet). It’s only when we’re young and foolish that we think this sort of thing would be the answer to everything; as we get older and wiser (if we do get older and wiser, that is, because there is of course no guarantee of that) we realise that ‘getting what we want’ could actually be the worst possible thing that could ever happen to us…

Psychologically speaking, getting our wishes manifested for us straightaway is hazardous in the extreme and one way in which we can understand why this should be so is to look at it in terms of ‘learning’ versus ‘non-learning’. All the emphasis in this technologically orientated world of ours is on ‘the efficacious obtaining of our goals’ and it is no exaggeration to say that our self-esteem (along with the esteem of others, which is of course a closely related commodity) depends upon how effective we are at realising our goals. If we are demonstrably effective in this we get to be called ‘a winner’, we get to be called ‘a success’. We don’t tend to express this quite so bluntly (because it sounds crude and unsophisticated) but this is nevertheless what it comes down to – we obtain our self-esteem (our so-called ‘confidence’) by being very good at controlling. Our confidence is entirely dependent upon our ability to control, in other words, so this is ‘confidence’ which can very easily turn into pure anxiety. ‘Conditional confidence’ and ‘anxiety’ are the same thing.

The need to control, and the wherewithal to do this, is not what we might call ‘a psychological strength’; on the contrary, when control is what we’re mostly concerned with then this points to an underlying weakness, not a strength. It points to a deficiency within us. Why is the ability to control so very important to us, after all? What’s the big fuss about? If we were truly ‘confident in ourselves’ (as in, ‘at peace with ourselves’) then we wouldn’t care so much about controlling, we would be more laid back than this, we would be more exploratory and playful in ourselves. We would have more of a sense of humour, more of a sense of irony about things. We wouldn’t be so concrete in our outlook – we would be open to the world, rather than being closed and controlling.

If we are successful in our controlling then what happens as a result is that we are able to stay closed, without any interruption to our comfortable closed way of life, and from our regular point of view this is exactly what we want. This is our goal. We can relate this to what James Carse calls finite game playing, the point of which is to ‘successfully resist change’. Just because resisting change seems like the best and most advantageous thing to do when we’re a finite game player that doesn’t mean that it is, however. The reason ‘successfully staying the same’ isn’t good for us isn’t too hard to see – when we resist change then what we’re actually resisting is ‘growth’ and when we resist growth (when we refuse to grow) then we are incurring suffering. We are incurring suffering because we’re going against our own essential nature.

The link between ‘valuing the ability to control’ above everything else and our ‘not growing as a person’ isn’t one that we tend to make! Conveniently enough, we don’t make this connection. To be excellent at attaining our goals sounds like a very dynamic thing to us; a society or culture that is highly advanced technologically also sounds wonderfully dynamic to us. We perceive ourselves as being ‘on a journey to somewhere great’, and we can’t wait to get there. What we don’t see is that realising our goals won’t allow us to move beyond ourselves and ‘moving beyond ourselves’ is what growth is all about. Growth means changing our viewpoint on things, not reinforcing it. Or as we could also say, growth means that we change (in a radical not a superficial way) so that what once seemed to be ‘an all-important goal’ no longer seems so important after all. Growth means outgrowing our ideas, not repeating them forever!

As Israel Regardie says somewhere, ‘The magician who sets off on the journey is not the one who attains to the summit’. Contrariwise – therefore – we can say that ‘the finite game player who sets off on the journey to the goal is exactly the same person as the one who arrives at the specified destination’. This is the whole point of finite play, after all. Between ‘the setting of the goal’ and ‘the obtaining of it’ there is no learning, no growth, no shift in perspective. If anything like that did happen (if there was to be some change happening between ‘conceiving the idea’ and ‘realising it’) then the game would be busted  – immersion in the dream would have been lost, the hypnotic power of the goal would have been broken and when the hypnotic power of the goal (which we ourselves are projecting) is broken then that’s the end of it. That’s ‘game failure’ right there. From the inverted viewpoint of the finite game player this is the ultimate disaster and so we will do everything we can to make sure that this eventuality never happens.

Our impatience is ‘our unseemly haste to realise the goal’. We’re ‘holding our breath’, we ‘can’t wait’ to get there (even though waiting is exactly what we’re going to have to do). Our impatience is what lies behind our controlling, behind our ‘heroic striving towards the goal’; we are – when we’re operating in this this modality – fixated upon ‘what’s happening on the outside’ and our belief (or assumption) is that when the correct type of change takes place ‘on the outside’ then this will transform (or fix) stuff ‘on the inside’. We wouldn’t put it like this of course because that would sound too foolish, but that’s what it comes down to all the same. This is ‘displacement-type activity’, it’s an example of ‘pseudo-solution’, and the whole point of displacement-type activity (or pseudo-solution) is that we must not see it for what it is – if we did see it then (clearly) then there would be no more ‘displacement of attention’ occurring! We’d be ‘seeing through to the heart of the matter’ and so there would be no more need for ‘the theatre of purposeful activity’! As long as we can keep on assuming (without knowing that we are) that the answer to everything lies in our goals, then we keep on doing this forever. Just as long as we remain fixated upon ‘change on the outside’ then we can avoid ‘change on the inside’, which is what we are referring to as growth. In one way, therefore, we can say that being in Goal-Orientated Mode is effective – it’s effective as a tactic by which we can indefinitely postpone actual psychological growth.

‘Patience’ means dropping our fixation on the outside. This isn’t to say that we don’t carry on doing whatever we’re doing (if that happens to be a helpful thing to do) but we’re doing it in a different way. We’re more conscious in what we’re doing – we can see that we are engaged in the ‘perennial game of displacement-type activity’ and as soon as we see this that takes the blind fanaticism out of what we’re doing. It takes the bleak humourlessness out of what we’re doing, it takes the brute aggression out of it. We can clearly see that obtaining some arbitrary goal not going to solve anything (in any magical, ‘wish fulfullment-type’ way) and so we stop putting all our money on it. We become graceful and sensitive rather than strained and utterly insensitive; we become peaceful rather than violent. It is of course true that learning patience is harder than anything else we might have to do in life but the biggest difficulty here is that we don’t want to learn it. We don’t want to learn it because we know on some level that this means ‘letting go of who we thought we were’. When we learn patience then everything is revealed to us, but the crucial point here is that we don’t actually want  for it to be revealed…







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Simulated Mental Health

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Would living in a simulation be a safe or an unsafe thing? Could it be bad for our mental health, for example? Are there any hidden glitches that we ought to know about? One way to reply to questions like this is to say that life in the simulation of life is the reverse of mental health – we could say that this state of being (the simulated state of being) is the perfect antithesis of mental health. It’s a great disaster, it’s the way not to do things…

Why this should be the case (why living a second-hand version life isn’t a healthy thing to be doing) might be considered too obvious to need pointing out, but we will make the argument all the same (if only for the sake of the exercise). The only reason we would want to live in a simulation of reality would be if we imagined – for some reason – that there was some kind of advantage to it, clearly, and so we can start by asking what exactly that advantage could be. Why would we imagine that ‘living a simulated life’ could be an improvement on the real thing?

One reason could be if the simulation were to contain more possibilities (or perhaps more interesting possibilities) than what is being simulated; it might – in other words – represent an upgrade. Maybe we could even be immortal and live as gods! Maybe we could cheat death… If we are prone to optimistic, utopian-type thinking then we might well have ideas like this in our heads. Instead of being used to somehow liberate humankind from the sorrows and limitations of our present existence the technology of simulation could of course be turned to the opposite purpose and used to oppress humanity even more than it is being oppressed already. There is an undeniable tendency for new technology to be used for malign rather than benign purposes, as has often been pointed out, and so this is definitely a possibility worth considering. If we’re not careful then we could end up in a ‘Matrix-style scenario’ where reality is being controlled in order to control us; this is after all exactly what’s happening now, even with the relatively low level of technology that we currently possess.

The higher the technology the greater the potential it has for abuse; when the technology to create super-realistic simulations comes on stream, then what exotic possibilities for abuse will this engender, we might ask? And as we were suggesting earlier, we don’t actually have to wait around too long to get an answer to this question – even in the absence of any super-advanced technology the potential for simulations of the world to be ‘used for ill’ has come into play. This kind of thing has been around for a long, long time – it’s been around for many centuries before the advent of the first printed circuit board. What we’re talking about here is better known as ideology (or belief) – the ideology or belief we adhere to defines the world for us just as effectively as any coding would. Ideology is coding – it is a comprehensive set of instructions telling us how to see the world (and which we then internalise and experience intense irrational loyalty towards).

Our beliefs condition our perceptions – we see what we’re supposed to see and we’re blind to anything else. We only see what our beliefs allow us to see and so then this proves to us that our belief system – whatever that might be – must be ‘the right one’. Beliefs tautologically prove themselves – any viewpoint that we adopt will tautologically ‘prove itself to be true’. Ideologies are simulations, therefore; belief structures are simulations and so if we want to look at the question as to whether simulations are harmful to our mental health or not then all we have to do is consider how we have got on with our beliefs, our ‘compulsory social conditioning’ over the centuries. All we need to do is consider therefore is whether this ongoing business of ‘having beliefs’ has been good for our mental health or whether it has been to our detriment.

This is not a question we ever stop to ask ourselves however – we most emphatically do believe that the blinkered way of looking at things that we have adopted is good for us. We most emphatically believe that the worldview to which we are adhering to is the right one, which automatically implies that it must be beneficial to us. In the case of a fundamentalist type of religion, our understanding is invariably that we will obtain our reward for choosing the right path in heaven whilst all those people who have not made the right choice (for whatever reason) will suffer eternal damnation as a consequence of their disbelief. This is – needless to say – very from being what we might call ‘an objective viewpoint’ – it’s actually the most biassed viewpoint we could ever have possibly have! It’s ridiculously biased… The fact that we have been inducted into whatever belief system it is that now has the claim on our loyalty means that we’re obliged to take the position that ‘our belief is the correct one’ – anything we might have to say on this subject automatically becomes quite meaningless therefore. All we are – in this case – is ‘a mouthpiece for a bias’, ‘a spokesperson for a prejudice’.

When we are inducted into the particular ‘simulation of reality’ that is created by our system of belief then we lose any chance of having an autonomous viewpoint – a viewpoint that is actually ours. Instead of autonomy we now have heteronomy (which is where everyone adheres to the very same way of looking at things). On the one hand, therefore, this shows how ideologies can be used (by those who are in a position to take advantage of such an opportunity) to control or exploit people, whilst on the other hand, the mechanism by which autonomy is replaced by the situation where masses of people are utterly dependent upon an unquestionable external authority can clearly be seen as a crisis in the mental health of everyone concerned. There is no greater crisis in mental health than the situation in which personal autonomy is subsumed within collectivism – this is ‘the loss of who we really are’, which is no small thing! It is treated as a small thing, to be sure, but that is of course no more than ‘societal whitewashing’. As Kierkegaard writes in The Sickness unto Death,

A self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.


This consideration – the consideration of ‘losing who we are without realising it’ – brings us to the very crux of the matter. The detrimental thing about living in a simulation is simply that there is no freedom whatsoever in it. As drawbacks go, this isn’t just punitive, it is total, it is ‘all-encompassing’ and as a result we’re cut off from everything that really matters. We’re alienated both from ourselves and the natural world. This is the ‘sickness’ that Kierkegaard is referring to, the sickness that befalls us when we live only ‘on the outside’, only in the ‘consensus reality’.  

Most men live without ever becoming conscious of being destined as spirit… There is so much talk about wasting a life, that only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or in sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, as self.

Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death


By ‘self’ Kierkegaard doesn’t mean the ‘socially constructed ego’ (or ‘identity’) therefore, but rather ‘the essence of who we are’, which is something entirely independent of any artificial societal context (which is what Kierkegaard calls ‘spirit’ in the quote given above). A simulation isn’t (needless to say) ‘an independently existing reality’ – there is of course nothing in it apart from what the designer, the artificer, has put into it. It can be regarded as being nothing more than an extension of the designer’s agenda or will. Although we tend to be favourably inclined towards the idea of ‘simulating our own reality’ and are intellectually excited by the notion (even to the point of seeing it as a way in which humankind can escape the eventual heat death of the universe, or ‘escape from the limitations of our physical mortality’, which is another well-known trope in modern science fiction) this is only because we don’t really get what simulations are. We don’t get it at all! Psychologically speaking, we might say, a simulation is an act of pure aggression. ‘Aggression’ – in this sense of the word – means that we are wholly subject to some extrinsic will, some extrinsic source of order. To control another person is an act of aggression, to tell someone else ‘who they are’ or (‘what the world is’) is aggression. All judgement is aggression (because we’re imposing our thoughts on someone else).

When we live in a simulation then everything about us is determined by that simulation. Our core understanding of what is real has been supplied to us by another, by an external source of authority – we’re ‘taking it all on trust’, in other words, and this core understanding what is real (which we have taken on trust, as we’ve just said) lies behind everything we think, everything we do, everything we hope for or fear. The totality of our existence is determined by this borrowed / unexamined way of understanding things. This picture of reality determines everything about us and yet it is an artificial imposition that has nothing to do with us (and which is – into the bargain – completely untrue, completely fictitious). There is no ‘true picture’ (or ‘true model’) of reality, only thought’s simulations, and thought’s simulations are – when it comes down to it – only ‘thought in disguise’. As the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna says,

All philosophies are mental fabrications. There’s never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things.



In order for there to be freedom in a simulation there would have to be truth, and – by definition – there isn’t any! In order for there to be freedom there would have to be ‘something there that is independent of the simulation’ but there isn’t. There isn’t anything ‘independent’ in a simulation. That’s the whole point of the exercise, after all; anything independent of the system straightaway gets labelled as error (and is promptly gotten rid of on this account). If I have designed a simulation and I find something in it that I haven’t specifically put there, then – by definition – whatever it is that I’ve come across has got to be error. It absolutely has to be a ‘meaningless random fluctuation’ – there’s nothing else it can be! My ‘getting rid of anything that doesn’t fit my plan’ (anything that doesn’t ‘accord with my agenda’) is the quintessential example of what we are referring to as ‘aggression’. Aggression is where I take away ‘the freedom things have to be different to the narrow way that I have defined them as being’. If a simulation isn’t aggressive then there’s simply no way it can get to exist…

When we indoctrinate someone (so that our view of the world becomes their view) then this is an act of pure violence, this is an act of outright aggression. What they might happen to think doesn’t count for anything, whilst what we think is ‘all-important’. We don’t – as a rule – see this as violence; we don’t see it as violence because we know we’re right! It doesn’t really matter what we believe, therefore – it doesn’t matter what we believe because we’re always going to be right. We’re going to be right no matter what. We’re always right and this is the benefit that we are given; this is the ‘incentive’, so to speak, that prompts us to buy into the belief system in the first place – we are provided with this immense sense of validation, this immense feeling of certainty, the iron-clad certainty that ‘we are right and everyone else is wrong’. This is the ‘benefit’, but we pay for it and the price we pay is also immense – we have had to give away all of our freedom. We aren’t even allowed to keep a crumb of it – we have had to give away the freedom that we had to be ‘who we really are’ so that now we are compelled to be ‘something else’ (something else that we’re not, and never could be). We are compelled to be the puppet of some mechanical external authority which – at the same time as compelling us in everything we do and everything we think – is also compelling us to believe that we are free when we absolutely aren’t.

Were we to come back to the question we started off with, then we would have to conclude that ‘living within a simulation’ (as opposed to ‘living freely’, as opposed to ‘living in an unsimulated way’) is most emphatically not beneficial for us, mental-health wise. If we were to define mental health as being ‘a function of our essential independence from thought’ (i.e., independence from our ‘ideas about things’) then since being subsumed within the conditioned or mechanical realm of everyday life means that we have zero independence from thought (means that we are thought!) this shows that we simply don’t have any mental health. Our mental health is completely missing, it’s completely missing since our ‘mental well-being’ and ‘intrinsic freedom’ are two ways of talking about the same thing. Instead of mental health, what we have is abject slavery. Instead of mental health, what we have is what Jung calls ‘Soul Sickness’, we have what Kierkegaard refers to as ‘The Sickness unto Death’. In the absence of the real thing, the very best we can hope for is ‘the two-dimensional appearance of mental well-being’.





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