Tag: Social adaptation

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.







Image credit – reddit.com


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


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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Society is a Zero-Sum Game

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We measure (and therefore value) ourselves on the basis of how other people see us and this – although we can’t see it – involves us in a vicious circle, a ‘runaway tautology’. Society is all about ‘measuring ourselves in terms of how others see us’ (whether we want to admit this or not) and that means that the social world – which is the only world we know – is a vicious circle, a self-devouring loop of logic that is constantly going around and around without the possibility of ever getting anywhere. The very ground we stand on (or think we stand on) is nothing more than a cheap hoax, in other words.


We stand to gain in the world that has been created by us comparing ourselves to everyone else – we stand to gain because there’s always a chance of us coming out on top, because there’s always the possibility of us ‘being admired rather than despised’ (to put it crudely). We stand to lose – therefore – for the very same reason. If we wanted to be more exact about it, we could say that, on balance, we stand to gain to the very same extent that we stand to lose.


Everyone playing the game knows this, of course (on some level, at least) but it doesn’t put us off because we’re willing to bet that we’re going to find ourselves amongst the winners rather than the losers. It seems perfectly reasonable to take this gamble, after all. We’re just as likely to come out as winners as we are to end up as losers and so this seems like acceptable odds as far as we’re concerned. ‘Seize the day’, we say. ‘Be positive and give it a go’. God loves a trier, after all, and ‘if you’re not in then you can’t win…’


From a purely personal point of view this logic would appear to make sense. This is the way games are played, of course – all games come with an equal risk of losing and winning and this is the challenge, this is the risk. Accepting the challenge posed by the game is widely held to be ‘the healthy thing to do’. This is pretty much our whole ethos right there – we have the greatest possible admiration for someone who boldly accepts the risk and then comes out on top. This is the glory we all aspire to – the glory of the winner.


Curiously however, we do not show much (if anything) in the way of sympathy for those of us for whom the venture turns out badly, which seems bizarrely arbitrary of us. They too have accepted the challenge of the game, after all; they too have taken the chance that they might not come out on top, just as we have. Why then do we look down on them as if there was something inherently unworthy or inferior about them? This hardly seems fair. It doesn’t seem very logical either – it isn’t actually logical at all. Why – we might ask – is there such a thing as ‘the indelible stigma of failure’ when it’s all just ‘the luck of the draw’.


There is a type of logic to this however, albeit it a very narrow and shortsighted type. There’s a brand of logic here, but it turns out to be not a very pleasant one. It’s certainly not a way of thinking that we’re in a hurry to admit to! The point (which we are so reluctant to dwell on) is that if I see I have come out on top purely by chance, purely because ‘someone had to’, then I don’t get to experience the glory that comes with winning. I could equally well not have won, so how can I possibly feel good about myself on this basis? The fact that I have done well in the game has nothing to do with any personal virtue of mine, after all. Being a winner doesn’t really say anything about me in this case. It’s true of course that I might have done better than my fellows because I’m smarter, or stronger, or better looking (all of these factors can confer advantage, of course) but the same point applies – I was born with those advantages, it wasn’t something special that I did and can take credit for…


We don’t just want to win, therefore – we want to win and feel worthy of it. We want the personal validation; we want to experience the glory that comes with being a winner! That’s what we wanted all along, not simply the bald fact that we have ‘come out on top’ in the system of ranking that makes up this inherently competitive society of ours. We’re ‘glory hounds’, we’re perennially hungry for the sweet taste of success. Basically, we want to feel that we’ve got to ‘where we are today’ by our own steam. As we’ve already said, it can’t just be that we were born into a better situation, or that we are gifted with more intelligence or cunning than our fellows, it has to be some sort of genuine honest-to-goodness personal virtue that we ourselves are responsible for.


The euphoric ‘hit’ of success is founded purely upon this belief – the belief that the fact I have excelled in the struggle demonstrates the existence of some special quality in myself that I myself am responsible. This is what the ego covets above all else – the feeling that we are ‘special’ (in a good rather than a bad way). This feeling – entirely illusory as it may be – is what all finite game-players are playing for. There is therefore a deliberate (if unconscious) dishonesty in this, and because of this dishonesty (which underpins everything we do in social life) we are obliged to live our lives in an entirely superficial or shallow way. We have no choice in this – as soon as we start playing the game we’re ‘locked into it’; that’s what the game is all about – we can’t go deeply into anything because that would blow the whole thing. Not being superficial would be a disaster because it necessarily invalidates the foundation upon which we are playing.


The flip side of this is that we automatically believe that if someone doesn’t make it in society or doesn’t do particularly well then that must be because of some personal flaw or weakness in their character. They deserve what they get (just as we deserve what we have got) and so we can rest content that ‘all is well in the world’. Without this ‘excuse’ for our shocking lack of compassion, our ruthlessly competitive way of life simply wouldn’t be able to continue, and we don’t want that. The game must go on, no matter what the cost. And if our circumstances change for the worse, we will judge ourselves just the same because that’s the way it works – ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’, after all.


Seen from the broader perspective it is abundantly clear that there’s no overall advantage to playing this game; this whole business of ‘basing our view of ourselves on what everyone else thinks of us’ is – if only we could see it – the worst idea going! Overall, it always comes down to ‘investing in a zero-sum game’. [‘Player one’s gain is equivalent to player two’s loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero’. Wikipedia] Playing the game necessarily makes us selfish – ‘playing the game’ is a selfish (if not flat-out narcissistic) thing to do and this means that we don’t ever take the wider view of what’s going on. As long as we have our fun then that’s all that matters. The logic of the game means ‘not caring that society is a zero- sum game’ – that’s how the whole thing works. That’s what we’re buying into.


Even if we look at it in a totally one-sided way (the ‘I’m alright Jack’ kind of a way that the system encourages us to) it still doesn’t work out for us. There’s no satisfaction to be had in ‘getting caught up in a vicious circle’, only the tantalising (and ultimately frustrating) promise of it. Our stark absence of compassion towards others rebounds on us as ‘the inability to be compassionate to ourselves’ and so – even if, by some freak chance, we were able to dodge the principle of ‘what goes up must come down’ – we’ve still ‘done the dirty on ourselves’. We’ve still done the dirty on ourselves since (as we’ve said) to enjoy ‘being a winner’ we are obliged to live life in a crassly superficial way. That’s the trap we’re caught in. Ultimately – no matter how skillfully we play the game, no matter how much pain we deflect onto our less fortunate fellow human beings – there’s no escaping the truth that ‘winning only exists in relation to losing’ and that – therefore – it’s only a hollow illusion.








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The Heteronomous Mode

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We could very easily spend decades (or even centuries) discussing what is right with society and what is wrong and still not get anywhere. This is a ‘hoary old chestnut’ – we each have our own opinions on the subject of ‘what’s wrong with the world’ and we are generally more than happy to talk about it pretty much ad infinitum. All of the ways that we commonly have of looking at this question miss out on something fundamental, however; we almost always fail to take into account what might be called the ‘psychological factor’ (which is to say, the question as to whether the social system we’re in favour of will help us to fulfil our true potential or whether it won’t). This – needless to say – turns out to be THE crucially important question to ask; the only thing here however being that we never do ask it. For the most part, we don’t even think of asking it.

We don’t know enough to ask the question because we don’t know anything about our ‘true potential’ (as is generally the way with potential); what’s more, we are being constantly fed all sorts of societal propaganda about what life is supposed to be, and what we’re supposed to be, which (inevitably) has absolutely nothing to do with our actual nature. This is what present day civilization excels at – persuading us that ‘we are what we aren’t’, persuading us to adapt ourselves in ways that will bring us nothing but misery. It’s ‘good to excel’, we might say – our culture adores excelling in whatever form it may take (since this is how we ‘distinguish ourselves from the masses’) – but excelling at whatever society tells us we should be excelling at is simply a sneaky way of controlling us, a sneaky way of enforcing social adaptation.

This line of reasoning brings us closer to an understanding of what we mean by the ‘psychological factor’ – the all-important psychological factor that we don’t ever (in our headlong stampede in the direction of progress) stop to consider, which has to do with the ‘wholesomeness’ (or lack of it) of the way of life that we are so busy creating for ourselves. We are led by ideas or trends that – for whatever reason – get amplified by society and which, as a result, go to form the basis of our way of understanding things. This is a classic positive feedback mechanism and we can explain what this means by looking at the phenomenon of celebrity. What positive feedback means in relation to celebrity may be expressed by saying that ‘the more famous you get, the more famous you get’. Whatever random fluctuation it was that started the ball rolling doesn’t really matter here since the phenomenon of fame doesn’t necessarily depend on anything outside of itself (which is to say, it’s perfectly possible to ‘become famous for being famous’, in which case, if I do become mega-famous, then this doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with any virtue on my part.

Another good example of this sort of thing would be fashion – things become fashionable (we might say) simply because they’re fashionable. If – for whatever reason – enough people take an interest in some nascent trend then, purely because of this interest, lots more people are going to become interested as well and so in no time at all the whole thing (whatever it is) is going to ‘take off’, is going to ‘skyrocket’. Again – as in all such positive feedback phenomena – there doesn’t have to be any good reason for what’s going on; the phenomenon feeds on itself (as we see illustrated in the ancient symbol of the self-eating serpent, the Uroboros). From the standpoint of sociology (or social psychology) we can say that this is a fundamental principle, i.e., we can say that, in a group (where everyone is necessarily ‘externally directed’), positive feedback loops are how things get to happen.

We might imagine that this process can be controlled (or ‘directed from behind the scenes’) but the whole point of positive feedback processes is that they aren’t controllable; they are – on the contrary – out of control. Control is on the contrary always a negative feedback mechanism; positive feedback – in contrast to this – is ‘the system running away with itself’. If it were the case that positive feedback loops could be deliberately engineered, then we would be doing that already. Anyone finding a way to get some sort of promotional material to ‘go viral’ would be able to sell this trick for billions – this is advertising’s ‘holy grail’ and no one has as yet found it. There is no such thing as ‘a formula to predict whether a meme is going to go viral or not’. What we’re saying here therefore is that there’s simply no such thing as progress in the way that we tend to think there is; what we call ‘progress’ is merely movement in the direction of ‘optimizing whatever it is that happens to be trending at the moment’, and when we say this then it does not of course sound quite so inspirational. It’s ‘utter garbage’ (albeit garbage that we are all pretty much obsessed with).

All of this is inherent in the nature of social groups – when we are members of a group then, as we have been saying, we are necessarily ‘externally directed’, we are necessarily in ‘Heteronomous Mode’. We are – in other words – orientated towards the ‘outside of us’ rather than ‘the inside’. We take our cue from the ideas that are circulating in the social matrix, not from our own insight, not from our own unique perspective on things. If ideas arise within us that aren’t congruent with the ideas that are circulating on the outside, that do not make sense in relation to the official viewpoint then we will disregard them, we will repress them, in fear of being embarrassed, in fear of making fools of ourselves. In order to be valid, an idea must be agreed upon by the collective; in order for society to hold together, we have to suppress our own creativity. To quote James Carse –

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces… Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished.

Just as we become culturally impoverished as a result of ‘following the script’, so too do we become personally impoverished as a result of being ‘heteronomous rather than autonomous. When we are always deferring to ‘what’s on the outside’ then this means that we are ‘neglecting what’s on the inside’, and that means that our ‘inner life’ becomes impoverished. It doesn’t just become impoverished, it becomes non-existent; it gets so we don’t even know what ‘an inner life’ is.  We now have the outer (or generic) life in place of the inner one but the thing about this is that the generic life isn’t actually life at all – it’s merely a mechanical formula, a meaningless script to be endlessly repeated. We can come back to the idea of potential here – merely living the generic (or socially prescribed) life then we are of course merely what we have been defined as being and this means – quite simply – that we don’t have any potential. The game we’re playing denies our potential – it automatically denies our potential since because the game (or the script) doesn’t recognise anything but itself and ‘itself’ doesn’t have any potential. It is only what it is defined as being; ‘what you see is what you get’, so to speak – there is no more.

Instead of potential (which is the same thing as depth) the prescribed life has ideals which we are continuously being pressurised to accord with. The better we are at reflecting society’s ideals (which on the level of the individual are quite meaningless) the more we are rewarded; far from realising our potential therefore we are ‘mimicking some sort of external standard’, some sort of ‘artificial template’ that has nothing to do with us. The more effort and time we put into actualising the societal template the further away we move from realising our potential; these two things – ‘optimising our game’ – and ‘personal growth’ are absolutely incompatible. One does not grow as a person by striving mightily to ‘be what society wants us to be’, in other words (which, when we put it like this, would seem to be pretty much undeniable). The social world – despite all its protestations to the contrary – doesn’t care one jot about our personal growth or well-being; on the contrary, its continued integrity depends upon us not growing, us not realising our potential. Its continued existence depends on our obedience, not our growth! The social system can hardly be blamed for this either, since it is functionally incapable of being otherwise; The responsibility lies squarely with us, not the collective which we hand over all responsibility to.

Our mental health can’t be ‘handed over for the collective to take care of’; Other things can be – the transport system, the water or electricity supply, the distribution and storage of foodstuffs, the treatment of sewage, and so on – but this thing that we call ‘mental health’ absolutely can’t be – mental health has nothing to do with arbitrary standards (or parameters) that have been set by a collective! Mental health has nothing to do with ‘conforming to an ideal’ – when we conform to an ideal this benefits the system that we are conforming to but it sure as hell doesn’t benefit us! We’re the ones who suffer here, not the system. We can’t expect a system that is made up of fixed rules or regulations to help us grow as the individuals we (potentially) are; we can’t expect this any more than we can expect it to somehow ‘cure’ us of the malaise that itself has brought about in us. And yet we do expect it to – it simply never occurs to us that there might be something deeply wrong with this bland assumption of ours…







Image credit – The New European

Living The Stereotype

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We live our lives in a world that is made up of other people’s thoughts, other people’s thinking. This is an idea which we can all relate to on a more-or-less superficial level, but which actually goes far deeper than we might imagine. We generally believe that thought ‘sheds light on the world’ and that each idea (once it has been scientifically approved of and added to our store of knowledge) takes us a little bit further in the direction of the truth, but that just isn’t how thinking works! We don’t – as a culture – validate thoughts or ideas for ourselves because they are true, but because they fit what we want to hear, because they provide us with ontological security. Each additional thoughts or idea about reality takes us further and further away from the truth, not closer to it. We claim – both individually and personally – to be interested in knowing the truth, but this doesn’t actually turn out to be the truth! We lie when we say we’re interested in the truth…

Living in a world that is constructed out of other people’s thoughts (which is what Robert Anton Wilson refers to as ‘our consensus reality tunnel’) turns out to be a total disaster because it takes something very important (or rather something essential) away from us and that is the chance that we have to live our lives ourselves, ‘first hand’, as it were. When this possibility is taken away from us this leaves us nothing with nothing at all – just a faded copy of life, just a poor shadow of the real thing. We are left in the position of having been cheated out of life itself and yet – despite this – we never protest. We don’t take to the streets in outrage – we don’t even see anything wrong with this way of doing things. As G.I. Gurdjieff says,

This strange trait of their general psyche, namely, of being satisfied with just what Smith or Brown says, without trying to know more, became rooted in them already long ago, and now they no longer strive at all to know anything cognizable by their own active deliberations alone.

Not only do we see nothing wrong with this setup, we see it as an opportunity for us to advance ourselves, an opportunity for us to do well in life and prove our worth. What we don’t stop to consider in our mad rush to make something of ourselves (and to avail ourselves of whatever is out there to to be availed of) is that there is something essential which we’ve quite forgotten about. We’ve forgotten to ‘check things out for ourselves’ rather than taking everything on trust and this means that we are in great danger of proceeding on a totally false (if not to say totally ludicrous) basis. And if our starting-off point is wrong then it doesn’t matter how much effort we put into what we’re doing, it’s all going to be ‘precious drinking water poured into the parched desert sands’ -we’ll never get it back and it won’t do the slightest bit of good to anybody. This is what J.G. Bennett refers to as the principle of Waste.

It’s as if we’re handed a parcel upon entering this world, and we’re told that it contains something very valuable in it (namely life) which we must be sure not to waste or throw away, but then we never bother to take a look at so as to see what it really is. Other people have told us what’s in it, what it entails, and how should go about living it, etc., and so we never bother to find out for ourselves. We take what we have been told on trust, just as those who are telling us took it on trust, and as a result of this misplaced trust we enter into the Circle of Confusion which is what ensues when ‘everyone copies everyone else’. We are provided – in effect – with The Book of Rules and all the emphasis is on correctly following these rules. No emphasis at all is placed upon investigating the rules and checking out their provenance. Quite the contrary is true – we are actively discouraged from doing so. We will be punished most severely for questioning them, for daring to think that we know better…

There are rewards for believing in the Presented Reality (in the same way that Jung says that there are rewards for pretending to be identical with our societal roles or masks) and this is what causes us to adapt to the template that is being offered to us. We’re getting on board with the story that’s being told us (because that story seems to be ‘where it’s at’, ‘where it’s all happening’) but it turns out that this is a path that takes us nowhere at all since it’s not actually our life we’re living but someone else’s second-hand idea about what that life should be. ‘Agreeing with the idea’ brings approval and acceptance and all that sort of stuff, but because the idea we’re agreeing with is what we might call ‘a hollow cliché’ or ‘blank stereotype’ this act of reckless identification it’s hardly going to pay out any dividends for us further down the line, which we’ve been told we can expect. We’ve been told that if we follow the rules then we’ll go to heaven but that just isn’t true – it’s just a device to sucker us, it’s just a trick to get us to play ball…

It’s not that anyone is deliberately deceiving us (although this can happen too, of course) there’s nothing deliberat a about what we’re describing here since everyone else is in exactly the same boat as us. Everyone else is doing exactly what we’re doing, which is ‘trusting the story of things that is being put about’. We might feel that we’re different and individual and not like every other random person on the street but inasmuch as we are buying into the same story of things that everyone else is buying into we are just another version of them. We’re another version of them because ‘the story of things’ we buy into defines us (rather than vice versa) – it tells us who we are and we can’t help believing it. ‘Heedless social adaptation’ is a mistake that we’ve been making for as long as human beings have existed; it’s a mistake that everyone makes, a hole that we all fall down, and – what’s more – it’s a mistake we don’t ever seem to learn from, a hole that we never climb out of. We just keep on repeating the same old mistake over and over again.

We’re drowning in a sea of ontological insecurity but instead of helping each other we’re pulling each other down (in our panic) into the mire of false identification; it isn’t the ‘sea of ontological insecurity’ that’s the mire but rather our attempted solution to it. Just as a drowning man might drown someone who comes to try to save him (unless they are cautious) so too we make matters worse for ourselves by trying to hold onto (and thereby ‘make real’) stuff that isn’t real. The only thing that can save us from our fate – the fate of ‘unquestioningly holding on to the official-but-untrue narrative of things’ – is the courage to go it alone, the courage not to grasp on to the framework of ideas that everyone else has grasped onto in the attempt to save themselves. Trying to save ourselves doesn’t work – trying to save ourselves is how we sink ourselves! The only thing that does work is for us not to attempt to save ourselves (which means ‘not compulsively buying into some convenient narrative’). When we try to save ourselves we enmesh ourselves in thought all the more and thought – like a heavy iron chain – unfailingly sinks us. Thought is ‘our attempt to hold on’ and the problem with this – as we’ve just said – is that there’s nothing there to hold onto. This means that it is our ‘attempted holding on’ that is the problem, and not the lack of anything to hold onto.

There is – we might say- a ‘psychological principle’ here that we can’t afford to ignore, a principle which states that a generic, virally-propagated idea of ‘what our life should be’ isn’t a legitimate substitute for us discovering, first hand (in a totally unique fashion) the truth for ourselves. Ignoring this principle means that we will pay a very high price in the form of suffering and while it’s easy enough to say the word ‘suffering’ and talk about it as if we actually know what we’re on about, when the thing itself comes along it’s a different story. The mistake we make is to ‘go along with a cheap copy for the sake of not having to make too much effort’ which – as everyone knows – is always a false saving. If I were to have an operation to replace a valve in my heart with a prosthetic unit then you can be sure that I won’t go for a ‘knock-off copy of a reputable brand’ just for the sake of saving a bit of money, and yet – when it comes to life itself – it seems that we couldn’t care less! It looks very much as if – for us – ‘saving money’ is the only consideration that matters…






Identity Politics

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In our mass-minded culture we are completely obsessed with this thing called ‘identity’ and the problem with this is that the identities which we are so obsessed with have nothing to do with who we actually are. They couldn’t be further away from it. No matter what identity we might pick to take shelter behind it’s never going to be anything even remotely connected with our actual nature. We’re talking about fake identities therefore; we’re talking about mistaken identities, misleading identities, manufactured identities – anything thought identifies as ‘us’ is always going to be a ‘false identity’ and – therefore -it is always going to be a dead end. As Alan Watts has so often said, ‘who we are’ is a negative thing not a positive one. We can only say what we’re not, not what we are – to say ‘what we are’ is to hand ourselves over to the tender mercies of ‘the Great Labelling Machine’! When I identify myself as this, that or the other then I confuse myself with an image, with a category of thought…

When we say what something is (or what we are) then this is simply the action of thought. We’re ‘identifying with the label’ in other words, we’re identifying with a mind-created description, we’re fitting in with a purpose-made category. We don’t get this at all however – our understanding is that the label or description stands for something in the real world. This is the very essence of what it means to be ‘unconscious’ – that we relate to our thoughts, our ideas as if they were the things that they supposedly represent. This is Baudrillard’s ‘realm of the hyperreal’ in a nutshell. This is the world of abstract ideas, the world of ‘dissociated or disconnected literal signifiers’ that we are compelled to adapt to if we are to be taken seriously by our fellow human beings; it is the game we’re obliged to play along with if we’re not to be shunned by all the other game players.

When we talk about ‘playing a game’ this doesn’t necessarily sound like such a bad thing but in psychological terms playing a game translates as ‘avoiding reality’, which – as we might suspect – isn’t a move that’s going to do us any good. There are consequences to avoiding or denying reality – burying one’s head in the sand doesn’t mean that ‘everything’s going to be fine’, it just means that we’re convinced everything’s going to be fine when – actually – it isn’t. This isn’t a playful game, therefore – there’s nothing cheery or light-hearted about it. It is – on the contrary – deadly serious; there’s no humour here at all, only ‘obeying the rules’, only ‘doing what you’re supposed to do’. This is – in other words – The World That Fear Made. We’re not denying or avoiding reality ‘for fun’ but because we are frankly terrified to do otherwise. We’re following the rules like machines because that’s the only way safety is to be found. It’s the only thing we can do, if we are to escape our fear.

The other way of putting this is to say that the social game is all about control – things have to be controlled because otherwise they will stop being what they’re supposed to be and they will start to be something else instead. And this is the one thing that can never be allowed to happen – not when we are afraid of ‘the unforeseen circumstance’. Life has to be controlled every step of the way; the basic gist is that our lives have to be strictly regulated to prevent ‘the bad thing’ from happening. We don’t exactly know what this bad thing is, but that only makes it more frightening! It’s a nameless fear and nameless fears are by far the worst kind…

If we didn’t control then then things wouldn’t get to be defined anymore – the meaning things have for us would drift and who knows where this could end? ‘Out of control’ is scary precisely because it is ‘out of control’ – it’s scary because we are no longer in the position of being able to say what will happen next… For us – in our everyday mode of consciousness – the meaning of things is very much something that needs strictly controlling at all times, therefore. It can’t be allowed to get away from us. This is absolutely crucial – the world must be a blank canvas for us to paint our meanings onto, it cannot be allowed to turn the tables on us and tell us that what we think is true isn’t. When we’re in Unconscious Mode and the world starts manifesting its own meaning then this is very disturbing for us – we don’t in the least bit like it. No one likes to wake up, as George Gurdjieff says – no one likes their dream to suddenly start falling apart…

Definitions (or literal descriptions) are another way of talking about the control of meaning therefore – we ourselves say what things mean, we ourselves impose the order that we wish to see in the world. We speak ‘on behalf of nature’, as James Carse says. We have silenced the gods and put ourselves in their place. If we were not to control the meaning of things then this artificial setup of ours would disappear without a trace, and so this is where the necessity for ‘joined up controlling’ (controlling with no break or pause) comes in – once nature has been successfully subjugated then we’re left to take charge of everything ourselves…

We end up therefore in this position where we are obliged to be controlling all the time – thought has created the world that is made up of rigid narrow literal meanings and it is our job to maintain it. We’re obliged to maintain the artificial world that thought creates precisely because it is artificial, precisely because it isn’t a naturally occurring thing, and the driving force behind our incessant controlling is fear. Fear doesn’t represent itself as fear however – represents itself as ‘free, volitional activity in the service of a genuinely good cause’ (i.e., the upholding of some extremely important principle or value). There is no important principle of value here however – only the undeclared need to hide away from the truth.

Identity or self is thus our way of hiding from the truth, curious though this may sound. This ‘truth’ includes the truth about ‘who we actually are’ of course, and the truth about ‘who we actually are’ is just as frightening to us as the truth about anything else! It’s the same truth, it’s what Buddhists call ‘the truth of emptiness’. This doesn’t mean that there is ‘no content’ involved but rather that this content, which is endless, can never be defined. Our labels are hollow (or empty) but the potentiality which they arise from isn’t – potentiality isn’t empty or limited, but anything that is pulled out of the undefined state of potency (or latency) inevitably is. To reify a phenomenon is to make it redundant – we end up with appearances which seem to be solid, but which have nothing at all behind them. Things don’t have to be said to be true in order to be true, in other words; the irony is that when we assert our truths in a concrete or literal fashion (as we very much like to) then they automatically become lies – to seize hold of something is to lose it.

Our longing for identity is our fear of our own incomprehensible potential therefore – we’re fleeing from the nameless unspeakable depths, we’re fleeing from the ‘infinite bewildering expansiveness of reality’ for all we’re worth and we find refuge from it by latching limpet-fashion onto some two-dimensional identity or other and ingeniously claiming that this ‘ten-a-penny cheap-ass identity’ is ‘the whole of who we are’. We could also say that our obsession with identity (which is our fear-driven avoidance of our true nature) is our way of ‘not taking on any responsibility’ but instead of seeing this dereliction of responsibility as being the result of fear we see it as a glorious achievement, we see it as something to be proud of, something to shout out triumphantly from the rooftops…

To live in a culture which is all about identity is to live in a culture where consciousness has been outlawed and where everything is seen backwards. We’re putting all our money on the wrong thing – we are energetically promoting the causes of misery, ignorance and confusion whilst at the same time claiming to be experts on everything under the sun! We could say many things about ‘the failings of society’ – we could say that it is based on the principle of inequality and exploitation, we could say that it’s full of corruption and power games, we could say that it’s all about striving for superficial values like money and status, but we are missing the point when we make these arguments. The point that we’re missing is that – as a culture, as a society – we are 100% dedicated to promoting distractions and avoiding the truth. That’s our game, that’s what we’re all about, and the thing about this is that when we are ‘100% dedicated to promoting distractions and avoiding the truth’ then there is clearly no way we are ever going to admit to this!






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The Generic Self

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There are, we could say, two paradigms, two ways of seeing or doing things, one of which is very familiar to us and the other much less so. The ‘unfamiliar paradigm’ is counterintuitive in nature and this explains why it is so rarely heard of; we can relate it to the ‘spiritual principle’ which says – ‘What you hold onto you lose, and what you give away comes back to you’. This is contrary to our common sense and as a result no one is going to take it seriously – if we hear this idea articulated we will scoff at it. This is why our whole way of life, our whole modus operandi, is based on the other paradigm, which is the obvious one – the one that does appeal to our common sense.

The other (obvious) paradigm is predicated upon the premise that ‘if we hang onto something tightly enough then we will get to keep it, whilst if we give it away, then someone else will have it and not us.’ This paradigm is super-obvious and everyone understands it, but at the same time it puts us completely wrong. It totally ‘wrong foots’ us. The whole of our civilization is based upon this premise, and it has been for a very long time, but this way of doing things has never resulted in anything apart from interminable violence, confusion and misery. From a psychological point of view, it couldn’t be clearer that living life in this narrow, self-orientated way is an utter unmitigated disaster, both for the individual concerned and for the community as a whole. This is the recipe for a thwarted and unfulfilling life, and yet we all still worship and admire billionaires, as if they have somehow uncovered the very secret of life! We hang adoringly upon their every word… Living life on the basis of ‘the unexamined idea that we have of ourselves’ is absolutely the least wise, and most suffering-producing thing we could ever do, and yet – on the positive side – it does drive the economy.

Were we to be a culture that is based on psychological insight (and if we were therefore possessed of a certain degree of wisdom), then we would be organised along very different lines – an infinitely greater value would be placed upon our mental well-being in this case! As things stand however we organise ourselves along the lines of ‘how we might best perpetuate the dysfunctional modality of existence that we have evolved for ourselves’. We pay lip service to the idea that we value human freedom and happiness, but this couldn’t be further from the truth – we value the system that we’ve been indoctrinated into and we will sacrifice whatever we have to in order to keep it going. It is – we might say – the ‘dark idol’ that we worship and sacrifice our children to. We pay lip service to the idea that we value human freedom and happiness but that’s just an empty formula. We claim to have psychological understanding but what our so-called ‘psychology’ comes down to is how to keep us functional whilst at the same time working strictly within the restrictive system. Working strictly within the system makes us unwell however and so our interest in psychology is all about keeping us on our feet by ‘managing’ this unwellness one way or another, in whatever way we can.

This is why we are as fond of the word ‘management’ as we are; in the world of mental healthcare we are continually talking about ‘managing this’ and ‘managing that’, and what this comes down to is keeping the distress within tolerable limits. We even have a type of psychological strategy that we call ‘distress tolerance’. In one way it could be said that our problem is that ‘we want to have our cake and eat it’ inasmuch as we want to maintain and perpetuate the system that we are part of at the same time as having the sense that we are leading meaningful lives, and feeling that we’re living autonomously (which is of course the only way to live!), but in another way we could say that this isn’t really a dilemma for us at all since our allegiance has already been decided – our allegiance is very much towards ‘perpetuating the established setup no matter what the cost might be’. It might be said that it is something of a marvel that no one ever seems to see this but – on the other hand – maybe it isn’t so much of a marvel once we consider that we are completely dependent upon the set-up that we have unwittingly created. We’ve lost our natural resilience and so we have to rely on the ‘artificial life-support system’ that is society instead. We are ‘dependent upon the Matrix’, even though the Matrix is a prison-system that is ruthlessly exploiting us and making us unwell.

We come across this idea in many places – we could go so far as to say that anyone who has ever looked into it has come to the same conclusion. Johann Hari for example, quotes Professor Tim Kasser as saying – ‘…we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life’. According to Gabor Mate, to give another example, ‘Illness in this society, physical or mental, they are not abnormalities. They are normal responses to an abnormal culture. This culture is abnormal when it comes to real human needs.’ In the following passage taken from her book Psychology with a Soul (1987. P 185-6), Jean Hardy, surveys the history of this discussion –

The idea had long been current in the nineteenth century that the ‘benefits of civilization and morals… had been acquired at the cost of man’s natural happiness… that civilized man remains forever an unhappy creature.’ (Henri F. Ellenberger) It is possible to see the growth of therapy as a response to the effects of industrialization and materialism on the inner life of individuals – the personal and collective load that every child in touch with feeling and not fragmented has to bear in a society with such meaningless injustices and horrors, known to all though more and more efficient communications, is considerable; this is the impact of Foucault’s writing, tracing the relationship between civilization and madness. ‘Look hard enough at reason,’ Foucault seems to be saying, ‘and you will find madness.’ And again, ‘madness came to be seen as the reverse side of progress: as civilized man became further removed from nature, the more he exposed himself to madness.’

The point is that society places no value on genuine human potential – it’s only interested in running the machine (which it conflates with ‘our own best interest’). Society makes us into the way it wants us to be, and then it takes care of us – after it has moulded us in its own image. It’s not really ‘taking care of us’ therefore, any more than social adjustment therapy (as Alan Watts calls it) is taking care of us. ‘Social adjustment therapy’ is all about looking after society’s needs, not ours (and the same can of course be said regarding our education system). Odd as it might sound to say, nothing in our collectively agreed-upon way of life is for the benefit of who we really are who or what it is for the benefit of is our collectively agreed upon idea of who we are, which is – to be perfectly blunt about it – a ‘phantom entity’. It’s not a real thing. The whole setup is there for the sake of this phantom entity, every little bit of it, and so our efforts might be compared to ‘throwing money down the drain’, or ‘pouring precious drinking water onto parched desert sands’. It’s a ludicrous, pointless exercise, and yet it is one we take very, very seriously. We’re putting all the resources at our disposal into the task of ‘making life as good as possible for the phantom entity which is the ‘Generic Self’ whilst totally and shamefully ignoring and neglecting who we actually are. Who we actually are has been entirely forgotten about…




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Life In The Generic World

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The Generic World runs on assigned meaning (as opposed to meaning that is innate, or inherent). We are – in other words – told what things mean in the Generic World. The meaning of our existence is imported from ‘the outside’, we might say. When we are told ‘what things mean’ then, in this process, we are very effectively made into prisoners – there is no better way of making people into prisoners than this. As actual individuals, we have been quite nullified.

There is no better way of making people into prisoners than by telling them what things mean and this is what we do all the time. We take a pride in telling recently arrived human beings what things ‘mean’, what reality consists of, what ‘life is all about’, and so in this way we pass on our lack of originality to the next generation. We pass on the prison to them, and we call it ‘culture’! This however only culture in the sense that it is the ‘culture of the prison’. Generic culture is always the culture of the prison…

When we are prisoners of the Generic World that nothing matters more to us than making sure that our offspring are prisoners of it too – ‘Well, my upbringing never did me any harm’, we say. We validate the state of being imprisoned and we want it for everyone. There is something frankly scandalous about the thought of someone not wanting to subscribe to the generic view of things, to the view of things that we all agree with. It’s as if we’re saying ‘Well – if I have to live in the Generic World then so do you!’  Only this isn’t a conscious attitude but an unconscious (or implicit) one – our conscious attitude is to validate the adapted modality of being, to say that it’s a good thing.

In terms of ‘group morality’ subscribing to the Generic World is the worthy and responsible thing to do – we get a pat on the back for this, we obtain the legitimacy that comes with being a member of the club. We have proved ourselves in this way, we have demonstrated our reliability and so we can be trusted. The converse is also true, of course – if we don’t sign up, or if, for whatever reason, we aren’t able to say the sort of things that we have to say in order to show as we are part of the group, then we’re left out in the cold. Not being a member of the group is immoral as far as the group is concerned…

The details or particulars of the Generic World have nothing to do with the truth, however – ‘generic’ (or ‘agreed-upon’) values and ‘the truth’ have nothing to do with each other! It’s all just a matter of spotting what everyone else takes for granted, and then taking it for granted too, in the very same way that they do. It’s all a matter of ‘working out what the game rules are and then following them as if you had been doing so all your life, following them as if you had always known them to be true…’ This is social adaptation in a nutshell – we have to forget that we were ever ‘un-adapted’, we have to obscure the fact as to the best of our ability. Nothing else is real but the game.

This is ‘an act of conformity’ rather than a ‘creative’ one; adapting to the template is what it needed rather than any actual originality. We create the Generic World via an act of mass conformity and then we ‘flip everything over’ so that conforming to the script that has been handed to us is ‘the great virtue’, and having our own individual take on things is ‘sheer wrongheadedness’. If we want to be truly accepted into the club then we have to fool ourselves along with everyone else; it is necessary for us to resolutely ‘turn our backs on the truth’. This act of ‘reality-denial’ is the price of admittance to the club.

We can’t ever let on that we’re conforming however, that wouldn’t do it all. On the contrary (as everyone knows), we are obliged to put on the show that this is what we really think all by ourselves, and that it isn’t the case that we are simply being coldly calculating in this regard (because we know what side our bread is buttered on). If we don’t sound properly sincere in our strenuous proclamation of loyalty to the generic values then this is the same as not conforming – we’re only pretending to conform in this case and so we’re going to be caught out. We’re not pretending sincerely enough…

So the situation is that – although we aren’t being true to ourselves – we have to pretend that we are. We have to pretend not just to others but to ourselves too – there must be no hint, on any level, that the show actually is ‘only a show’. We are copying from the template rather than being creative, and yet it is necessary that this act of mimicry present itself as being somehow ‘original to us’. We are reading from the script but we have to pretend that we’re being spontaneous; we are acting in a calculated way, looking for a very specific advantage, and yet we have to convince ourselves that we’re not. This is the tightrope we have to walk.

The Generic World is a very superficial kind of place, therefore. Everything has to exist on the one single level of meaning – if there were any other possible levels of meaning, or ‘levels of description’, then this would spoil the game. If there was ‘anything else’ then this would seriously distract from the effect. The generic world is a very bland one in other words, it’s a world that is entirely without nuance, entirely without individuality.  It’s a literal world. Or – as we could also say – the Generic World is the Image World, the world that is made up of two-dimensional meanings.

In the two-dimensional world of mass-produced literal truths – which is the world that thought creates – there can only be the one meaning for things,  the meaning that has been written down, the meaning that has been set down in law, the meaning that all right-thinking people subscribe to, and the consequence of this is that all other meanings are heresies that have to be dismissed, dangerous lies that have to be fought against. Everything is very obvious, very unambiguous in the Image World, and so the message is that we ‘just have to get on with it’. What we’re supposed to be ‘getting on with’ is entirely banal however – everything is always banal in the two-dimensional image world but we – for the most part – are too consumed by the game to ever notice this. The utter absurdity of ‘life in the Generic World’ is quite lost on us…




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