Ignorant And Proud Of It

Aug 25. 2026

Wherever we go and whatever we do, we create ‘closed systems’ for ourselves to live within, for us to operate within. This is a bit of a redundant thing to say of course since closed systems are the only kind we can create! No one can create an open system – that just can’t be done. Openness can’t be created, can’t be engineered – it can only be revealed.

What’s more, when we do create a closed system there is a huge tendency for that system to become – as far as we’re concerned, anyway – the whole world. If it is allowed to ‘do its thing’, it very quickly seals us in; it very quickly becomes something we can neither see beyond nor imagine beyond. It encases us completely – which is of course only what we would expect it to do. Closed systems enclose – that’s the whole point of them.

The process of adapting to a closed system, to a closed world, necessarily involves losing the perspective to see beyond it. That is the whole idea of adaptation – if we are to utilise the system, if we are to be able to interact efficiently within it, to ‘effectively operate it’, then it is of course necessary that we learn to think in its terms. We have to ‘learn the rules’ – our way of looking at must become congruent with its way, and this means not being conscious of any other way. Maximum adaptation – which is to say ‘maximum efficiency in operating the system, or ‘operating the machine’, requires maximum congruence therefore and maximum congruence means faithfully echoing that system. It means ‘becoming the same as it’. In short, maximum adaptation means becoming the system. The Great Amoeba engulfs us completely, and then ‘reimagines us in its own image’…

This is ‘the Logic of Optimisation’ and the logic of optimisation is what mechanical living is all about (‘mechanical living’ being where we live by the rules so that nothing happens randomly, so that nothing happens spontaneously or freely). When we adapt to life in a closed system there’s no room for anything else apart from living mechanically, apart from living by the rules. Adapting to a system essentially means ‘simplifying ourselves down’, it means ‘ditching everything that doesn’t fit into the closed world that we have opted to adapt to. It means ‘only focusing on what makes sense within this narrow context’. <Focusing on the defined foreground> means <disregarding the background>; <fixating on the goal and the method / skill set we need to master in order to obtain it> means <becoming blind to all else>. A pickpocket doesn’t see people, he sees pockets. Or to quote Baba Hari Dass, “If a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets”.

The end point of this process of adaptation to the given structure or system is thus the point at which we only see <the figure> and believe therefore that it is ‘an independent entity in its own right’, that it is ‘the actual world itself’ (rather than merely being an illusion that we’ve created by focusing that comes into apparent existence by the action of ‘not attending to the background’). The ‘creative’ part of this – using the word very loosely – is our disowning of what we ourselves have done – we project a black-and-white picture and then pretend that that it was there all along, that it isn’t ‘our own production’. This is the ‘Unconscious Mode’ – this is the ‘Closed’ (or ‘Shut Down’) Modality of existence in which we never encounter anything that we ourselves haven’t put there.

The end point of the process whereby we adapt to the given structure is the situation where the pickpocket lives in a world made up entirely of pockets and never has to concern himself with anything else. It is the situation where the pickpocket never has to consider ‘the greater context of what’s going on’ (which is to say, the situation where our pickpocket never has to confront the fact that <pockets> are actually <people>, and that they don’t have an independent existence of their own. The world in which the only thing that exists is [1] ‘The pickpocket’, and [2] ‘The pockets that make up the pickpocket’s subjective world’ is a closed system – nothing can come into the picture unless it has to do with <the goal> and <stuff that is relevant to the goal>. We have thus turned the goal into the whole world and in this ‘world’ all that exists is the goal and the one who seeks to obtain it. All that exists is the goal the one who seeks to construct themselves in relation to it (i.e., in relation to the burning question as to ‘whether we can succeed in attaining it or not’).

If the goal is ‘the whole world’ to me then there is of course no way that I can’t define myself in relation to it (since there’s simply nothing else there). I project the black-and-white picture (which is to say the system, which is to say, the game) and then I define myself in terms of this picture, in terms of this game. First I project the illusion and then I construct myself in relation to it, which means that I’m no longer able to see the illusion to be an illusion, or to see the game to be the game. Everything is painted with the same brush, so to speak – the thinker is not in any way different to the thinking that creates it. This is bootstrapping therefore: Step 1 is that we invent the game (which is to say, we ‘pull it out of thin air’) and Step 2 is that we construct ourselves in terms of it. I create the figure by turning a blind eye to the background, and then I construct the idea that I have of myself in relation to this creation of mine. I make the implicit argument that because the figure is real, then so too must I be (since I exist purely in relation to it).

When we adapt ourselves to the game that we’ve been given to play we enter into a closed system, therefore. When we ‘optimise our goal-orientated activities within the assumed context’ (the context that makes that goal meaningful in the first place) then we get cut off from the wider context which is ‘the Whole’, and when this happens we get ‘swallowed up by the tautology’, we get ‘swept along by the Linearity’, we get ‘devoured by the Dragon’, we get ‘engulfed by the Great Amoeba (or however else we might want to put this). This is ‘the disaster we can’t see to be a disaster’ – instead of seeing it as a disaster we see it as ‘an opportunity to achieve something great’, we see it as ‘our chance to achieve something truly wonderful’. This is what the System is telling us, after all – this is how it sells itself to us. The Logic of the System (the system which has illegitimately become the whole world to us) is all about ‘getting somewhere’, all about ‘progress’ or ‘achievement’, It’s all about ‘success versus failure’ and we have opted to go along with this logic (the polarising logic that tells us we can either win or lose, the polarising logic that says movement in one direction is advantageous whilst movement in the other, complementary direction is not.

The logic of <PLUS> versus <MINUS> isn’t given to us as ‘an option’; it’s not as if we are told that we can chase the goal if we want to but that we don’t have to – this logic is an imperative, it’s ‘the way things absolutely have to be’. There’s no freedom here – it’s ‘my way or the highway’. Games aren’t founded upon the principle of freedom (which would mean that we’re ‘free to play or not play as we see fit’) – not playing isn’t an option. The idea of ‘not playing’ can’t even arise because the game is now the whole world to us. Closed worlds are quintessentially coercive – the only thing we can do in a game is strive as hard as we can to win. Losing isn’t an option. This ‘lack of freedom’ – as James Carse points out – is what makes the game be a game. We have to veil our intrinsic freedom from ourselves in order to play, in order to obtain the motivation to strive so hard to win. Winning wouldn’t be as exciting a prospect to us as it is if we didn’t perceive our situation to be uncompromisingly black-and-white. Winning wouldn’t actually mean anything to us in the absence of the rule that says ‘YOU HAVE TO WIN’.

Extrinsic Motivation – which is ‘motivation that is supplied for us from the outside’ – is what makes the game and in order for there to be such a thing as extrinsic motivation our inalienable Intrinsic Freedom has to be veiled. We need to submit the External Authority of the game since it is only by taking the game seriously in this way that we can define ourselves in relation to it. If we didn’t take the system seriously (as seriously as it itself demands it should be taken) then we couldn’t take ourselves seriously either – and ‘taking ourselves seriously’ is the REAL POINT of the game. If playing the game without knowing that we are is how the conditioned identity is created and maintained, then of course there can be no awareness of the freedom that we have not to play it. Two ingredients are needed here therefore – not only do we have to keep on playing the game (even though there’s no real progress in it since it’s a ‘loop’, since it’s a ‘turning wheel’) we also have to remain blissfully unaware that ‘the game actually is a game’ because this is the only way the conditioned identity can seem real to us. This is what keeps us perpetually stick in Unconscious Mode (which we might also call ‘the modality of ignorance’). Ignorance needs to be aggressive – it needs to constantly defend itself, it needs to continuously and relentlessly assert itself. It needs to be heedless, aggressive, violent, and insensitive – those are after all ‘the conditions of its existence’.