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’…
Image credit – pcgamer.com