Heteronomy is the perfect antithesis of mental health and yet it is also ‘the order of the day’. It is also ‘absolutely obligatory’. If we’re not in the Heteronomous State then by definition there must be something wrong with us, by definition, we must be a troublemaker, we must be a maverick, we must be a loose cannon, and so on and so forth. Basically – if we’re not a team player then we can’t be trusted. Only those who value the external ‘culture’ (the set of expectations that we all subscribe to) more than they value their own conscience will be trusted.
To be a team player is the antithesis of mental health however, as we started out by saying, and that’s something we almost always lose sight of. We lose sight of the fact that – as Jung says – the individual is the only carrier of value, not the group, not the collective, not the State… The collective (which is to say, the team) is a convenient idea and nothing more. It’s just like the average of a bunch of numbers – not a real thing, not a real datum, but just a useful abstraction – useful to play around with, useful when it comes to manipulating these numbers, useful in performing logical operations. This pragmatic ‘usefulness’ doesn’t change the fact that the average of a set of numbers is purely imaginary, however. The ‘average’ is our own creation, our own device…
When the individual is ignored in favour of the group then ‘the real is being subjugated to the imaginary’. The boot is on the wrong foot – the actual is sacrificed on the altar of the abstraction, the idea. The actual – which is to say, the individual – is inherently awkward – it can’t be co-opted into a neat and orderly system. It couldn’t fit in even if it wanted to. The individual can’t be assimilated neatly within the standardised (and therefore reproducible) set of relationships that makes up the social world; the sovereign individual has no place here, only the conditioned (and therefore heteronomous) person is recognised as ‘a legitimate and worthy member of the Collective’. You can only be one of us when we have told you who you are! We solve this fundamental incompatibility in the only way we can – by ‘ignoring or denying the unique in ourselves and focusing entirely on the regular’. We salute the flag, in other words. Everything exists for the convenience of the system and the only reason this fact doesn’t strike us is because always we see things in the way that the social system wants (or requires) us to see them. That’s the only reason we don’t ‘smell a rat’ – the fact that we are all suffering from a kind of super-pernicious, utterly ubiquitous ‘Stockholm Syndrome’…
The social system is designed to serve the ideal human, the expected human – not the actual real one. No one cares about the actual real person (which we pretend doesn’t exist); the social system supports its own version of ‘what it means to be a human being’ and that ‘version’ has nothing to do with us, nothing to do with our actual, ‘non-negotiable’ nature. Adapting to the regular or rule-based world means losing our inherent irregularity (our ‘individuality’) – this is of course what the process of adaptation means – it means exchanging our true non-reproducible nature for the ‘one-size-fits-all’ convenience of being a regular (interchangeable) person. The problem with this is that the regular or adapted person – the person who fits into the presented structure just like a block of Lego fits into a wall made of Lego – is only a convenient fiction, exactly like the average, and the consequence of this is that the life we lead as a result of identifying with the average is also going to be purely fictional. The consequence is that we are all going to lead imaginary lives (for all the good that this will do us) and this is always going to be the case when we are existing in a heteronomous fashion (which is to say, when we are existing on the virtual platform that is produced by Thought’s expectations, Thought’s narrowly biased reading of our situation).
In our day-to-day lives this never occurs to us – we might agree that a social role or identity is necessarily a construct (which is to say, ‘an invented thing’) but – even so – we never pause to consider that to live purely on the basis of this socially constructed identity is to lead a fictional life. Furthermore, whilst we might acknowledge that there are these societal roles which have nothing to do with who we really are (since the regular can never represent or take the place of the irregular) we still don’t see the extent that we have been replaced by the generic construct (and all constructs are of course necessarily ‘generic’). We are completely insulated from this shocking awareness (which is the awareness of our profound inauthenticity); we can’t see this because we haven’t the perspective available to be able to do so – our way of looking at the world is strictly formulaic, strictly abstract, and that means we can’t see the formula to be a formula to us. To us it just looks like ‘the way things are supposed to be’ (due to the infallible mechanism of bias-confirmation) and this is the collective hallucination, the hallucination that binds us together in such an unnatural way.
To adapt to the system is to lose the ability to see that the system is the system – which means that we see ‘the World of Regularities’ as being the only one there is. Not seeing the game to be a game means that it becomes the whole shebang to us; it becomes ‘reality as it is defined as being’. If we take rules seriously then they devour us – they devour us without leaving a trace since a rule works by denying (or suppressing) anything that doesn’t agree with it, anything that deviates from the standard that it has put in place. The game soaks up all our attention with the result that we don’t pay any heed to anything that doesn’t make this aggressive demand on us, anything that isn’t a compulsive magnet for our attention, and the result of succumbing the aggression of the system in this way is that we get to live in a reality made up of pure control. Or as we could equivalently say, we get to live in a reality which is marked by pure unremitting conflict – unresolvable conflict, inherent conflict, conflict that goes on forever… We get to live in the Compulsion World, the world that has nothing in it but ‘pushing and pulling’, nothing in it but ‘shouting and roaring’, nothing in it but ‘rules and control’, and this isn’t the real world but a hideous parody thereof. It’s as if I am the hapless inmate of some dreadful old institution where the (institutionalised) staff have fallen into the bad habit of shouting (rather than speaking gently) to their charges. They are all ‘shouty’ and ‘controlling’ and have no sensitive side to their nature – they have become ‘abusers in an abusive situation’. Aggression is the only thing. Once this becomes the case then there is simply no point in you trying to communicate with me in a normal, reasonable tone because I just won’t hear you! I have become desensitised (or ‘brutalised’) – shouting (or forcing) has now become the norm and so anything else (anything non-coercive) simply won’t register. If I’m not forced to do something then it just won’t happen; spontaneity has been extinguished in everyone concerned – the one who is controlled isn’t spontaneous, and neither is the one who is busy doing the controlling…
This is what it’s like when we adapt ourselves to a mechanical system – anything subtle – anything that isn’t an ‘in-your-face, kick-in-the-ass compulsion’ doesn’t exist for us. Subtlety (or nuance) doesn’t exist for us – only orders, rules and regulations exist and there’s no nuance in them. The Non–coercive world just isn’t ‘a thing’ for us – it’s a fable, a fairy tale to laugh at. If someone were to tell us that the real world isn’t governed by rules (and that – ultimately – there is no such thing as ‘a rule’) then we would laugh scornfully at them. Although you couldn’t tell us this, we live in a world that has no peace in it, no possibility of peace, a world that could not ever have any peace in it. You couldn’t tell us this because we are kept in the game by the deluded belief that if we play our cards right then we will be rewarded with ‘the peace that comes with final victory’ (the peace that comes about when we have crushed all the opposition). It is this that is the ‘fairy-tale’, however – there is no ‘final victory’ in the struggle between the two opposites. The whole point is that there no ‘final resolution’ in a polar situation; nothing in the Virtual Compulsive Environment is final. The VCE is made up of two opposing forces of equal potency, two disagreeing compulsions of equal magnitude, and so neither side can ever ‘overcome’ the other. What we have here is a situation that is characterised by the endless reversal of polarities and – very obviously – there’s nothing final about the endless reversal of polarities.
When all that there is are these two ‘equal and opposite forces’ (one manifesting in terms of a movement to the right and the other in terms of the equal and opposite movement to the left) then the net result is nothing at all. The next result is exactly the same as if nothing had happened and this is actually the case – ‘to cross twice is not to cross’, says G. Spencer-Brown in his Laws of Form. if you thought something had happened, then you would have been mistaken; If you thought something had happened then that is only because you have only seen half the picture (not the full one). It’s not as if we can even say that there are these two directions (which is to say, that there is the possibility of moving in one of two opposed directions) – that too is a hallucination. It’s not possible to take a step to the left without also taking a step to the right (the two movements can’t be considered as ‘separate things’) and what this means is that in the symmetrical situation (which is that little thing that we call ‘Reality’) there is no ‘stepping forwards or backwards, there is no movement either in the one direction or the (supposed) other. The whole thing is a hallucination – it only seems like not a hallucination when we’re operating within the system (when we’re operating on the system’s terms) and this doesn’t count for anything since the system’s terms are ‘arbitrary’, are ‘made up’, are ‘invented’ and have no application outside of that system itself (and ‘the system itself’ – the Formal World – is only there because we have agreed with ourselves to say that it is).
To be heteronomous is thus to exist as a function of the Virtual Compulsive Environment; whatever type of ‘existence’ we might imagine ourselves to have is nothing more of then an extension of the artificial construct that we have agreed to see as real (without in any way registering that we have made this crucial agreement). Any ‘dignity’ that we might perceive ourselves to possess is – in reality – nothing more than cheap self-validation and if we need to validate or affirm ourselves in order not to feel ontologically shaky (or ‘fake’) then there is of course nothing remotely dignified about this. We’re being treated as complete fools. What we’re looking at here is merely ‘a lie in support of another lie’, ‘one lie on top of another’, a ‘buttress to hold up another buttress’, and this is an infinite regress that goes nowhere (no matter how hard we might try to get it to do so). How can there be any such thing as ‘dignity’ or ‘integrity’ when we are serving such a fickle master as the VCE? The VCE (which is to say, the Simulation) robs us of our autonomy and in so doing it robs us of everything. It leaves us nothing at all. More than merely being ‘fickle’, the Compulsion World mocks us – it ‘takes the piss’ in a big way. The Virtual Compulsive Environment couldn’t take the piss more blatantly if it tried – we are mocked, degraded, abused, and yet we contrive not to see this. No matter how many times we have been cheated, we continue to ‘act in good faith’ – ‘good faith’ that will never ever be returned…
Image credit – vagabundler.com
