‘Freedom is taken, never given’, says Gurdjieff. If there is one who controls us, rules us, regulates us, then no matter how long we wait, no matter how well we behave, no matter how compliant we are, we are never going to be given back our freedom. Hell will freeze over first.
Being controlled or ruled by others (or by society) isn’t an unusual state of affairs either – when we are in the unconscious or conditioned mode of existence then all of our relationships are control-based. We don’t generally see this because we tend very much to go along with this control, which makes it invisible to us. With we agree with the other person or with the group or in society in order to obtain a very specific benefit, in order to be accepted, in order to be validated as who we are pretending to be.
We agree with other people not because we perceive what they’re saying to be true, but because we want them to be our friends, says Kurt Vonnegut. We value friendship or acceptance over the truth in other words, and – from a strictly pragmatic point of view – this makes perfectly good sense. The result of this pragmatic act of agreeing with others is however that we end up is that we end up being controlled, we end up being controlled by whatever it is that we have agreed to accept as being true (even though it isn’t). We end up slaves to a particular set of ideas about the world, and because these ideas aren’t true this will – of course – ultimately work against us. The benefit we chase is illusory.
Because of this automatic tendency of ours to seek security by automatically agreeing with other people (or with society as a whole) we end up in a state of heteronomy rather than autonomy. Our truth lies outside of us rather than inside, and as a result we lose not just our freedom to ‘think in a different way to everyone else’, we also lose our authenticity – when truth is said to exist outside of us then we have lost our connection to who is essentially are. The External Authority cannot confer being (which is to say, ‘authenticity’), it can only confirm the false sense of security that comes with conformity.
To agree with anything (or anyone) is to lose authenticity, is to lose essential being. To accept anything as ‘the truth’ is to lose touch with who we really are – someone else’s truth is always a lie, we may say (paraphrasing Jung). There’s no formula for life, no matter how tempting it might be to think that there is; if you live life according to a formula or according to a rule then you are not living. The upshot of all this is that if we opt for the security of belonging and acceptance which we do by buying into someone elses version of the truth, then at the same time we are opting to be controlled by this so-called truth actually, which is actually a narrative and artificial narrative that we have agreed to accept. Being controlled isn’t just an inconvenience, isn’t just a pain in the ass, it’s how we get negated as the actual individual we are. To be controlled is to lose our authenticity, and yet at the same time remind blissfully unaware of this loss. To quote Søren Kierkegaard –
The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.
Being controlled isn’t an unusual state of affairs therefore – insomuch as we belong to any group at all (which is to say, inasmuch as we have agreed to subscribe to someone’s else’s version of the truth in order to obtain the benefit of feeling secure) we are all being controlled by ideas that we aren’t able to question. Inasmuch as we automatically accept a mass-produced external or official truth – instead of ‘looking within’, as it is said – we’re never going to be free, we’re never going to be who we really are, we’re never going to be at all real in ourselves. We are going to think (or assume) that our lives a real, that the person living our lives is authentically, genuinely who we truly are, even though the stark truth is that the one living our lives is nothing more than a socially manufactured stereotype, an empty cliche.
This would of course be a terrible thing for us to discover, which is the reason no one ever teaches it in any psychology department on the planet – we prefer our collective, generic approach to psychology, which trundles along its way, bizarrely oblivious to the fact that all of this highly portentous stuff we keep coming out with in the name of psychology (the untold terabytes of data that have been generated on the subject) is all about the ‘psychology of a shadow’, all about the ‘psychology of a social fiction or rumour’, all about the ‘psychology of an empty cliché or stereotype’). We who really are is never mentioned. This is an absurdity that no one wants to draw attention to, an absurdity that we are all more than happy to go along with.
There never could be such a thing as ‘a collective approach to psychology’ – there never could be such a thing as this since any collective approach is always going to involve pragmatic agreements as to what is true and what is not true, and whenever there is an agreement as to what is true then whatever it is that we say to be true is automatically going to become a lie. Once we agree that it’s true then it can’t be. To discover this would obviously be a highly inconvenient thing for us since it would immediately ‘throw us back on ourselves’, so to speak, and this is exactly what we don’t want. As preposterous as it might seem, our reluctance to be inconvenienced is the reason we are so happy to collectively turn a blind eye to the absurdity of our conditioned (or ‘programmed’) existence.
As long as we continue to opt for the security of a truth that exists outside of ourselves then nothing we say or think or do is ever going to amount to any more than insubstantial fluff – empty of any meaning apart from the meaning that we ourselves put in it. It isn’t possible to see the truth (or in any way get close to it) just as long as we prioritise security over everything else. To feel secure in the way that we want to we need to be controlled by a truth that cannot be questioned – a truth that supposedly exists objectively ‘out there’ – and if we are being controlled by an external authority in this way then there’s no way that we can ever come back to ourselves – we will continue to be run by the system as fake or two-dimensional versions of who we really are, we will continue to be run as tokens of a truth that has been forgotten about.
The system isn’t in the business of granting us freedom (as we have said) that’s the one thing it will never do despite continually promising to do just this. At the same time however where can looting in the process because freedom doesn’t actually interest ask that much anyway. We’re just not orientated that way we are on tour entitled towards the truth but towards security, the security of being able to believe that we ah who the social world says we are. The security of believing that we are independent ‘choosers and doers’, when really this is just a manufactured illusion that none of us wants to see through. Gullibility pays dividends in this regard. A ‘coercive virtual environment’ to tell us who we are every step of the way is exactly what we want, that’s precisely what makes the illusion work. What makes the illusion work is ‘us not having any interest in how the illusion works’…
Image credit – Kani Alavi. East Side Gallery
