Instead of life, we’re given a package, a game, and this package / game is made up of two aspects: [1] the aspect that we are supposed to see and believe in, and [2] The aspect which we are not supposed to see, which we are not supposed to know about. We see the front end but not the back end, in other words. This is how the Designed Environment always is – there are always these two aspects, these two elements, and if we saw them both at the same time (the back end plus the front end) then this would render the Designed World uninhabitable. We would no longer be able to ‘play the game’, in this case…
The ‘front end’ is the palatable end, the attractive end, the end which seems to hold out all sorts of promises to us, whilst the ‘back end’ (which is – as in the story of Bluebeard the pirate and his many unfortunate wives – the ‘forbidden room’, the ‘room that we are not allowed to enter’). If we do enter it then that’s it for us – we have to suffer the penalty for our disobedience, and the penalty is the loss of the life we thought we had (which is the life of a prisoner who doesn’t know that they are a prisoner). Just as long as we abide by the game rules then we can continue to enjoy the illusion of freedom, whereas if we break these rules (and take a peek at what we should not be peeking at) then that’s the end of this ‘comfortable but illusory’ existence. ‘Sleep is very comfortable, but waking up is very bitter’, says Gurdjieff (seeing the simulation to be only a simulation is very bitter).
Actual awareness of our situation (i.e., seeing both the overt and the covert sides of the game at the same time) would mean seeing that we live as slaves to a master who cares nothing about our welfare but – on the contrary – maintains the conditions necessary for our physical survival purely for his own benefit (since slaves have to be kept alive if they are to be continue to function as such). We’re not the autonomous individuals we like to think we are but only a bunch of gullible dummies who have been suckered into believing a whole load of nonsense. We’re not ‘in charge’ in the way that we imagine we are – on the contrary, we are like farm animals who foolishly imagine themselves to be the fortunate beneficiaries of some sort of ‘benign guardian’ who tends and protects them. We certainly don’t see ourselves as mere livestock, as ‘lambs destined for the kebab-shop’. The Front-End view shows us a very different picture indeed: instead of seeing ourselves as the slaves of a master who is only interested in us because we’re food, we see the setup or arrangement as existing purely for our benefit. Instead of seeing that we are being coldly exploited and abused, we see our situation as being ‘geared entirely towards our well-being’. We’re seeing things in a peculiar upside-down way, therefore – instead of seeing ‘the trap’, we see ‘the cheese’, and that’s why we find the trap so attractive, when we ought to be utterly horrified by it.
The game that we are being taught is ‘The game of pretending that everything is OK when it isn’t OK and then pretending that we’re not pretending’. The game that we have been trained to play is the game in which we ‘see everything backwards’ so that our abuser appears to be our benefactor. We’ve been manipulated into taking a position that is ‘against ourselves’ and we don’t see what we’re doing because we’re ‘siding with the aggressor’, ‘siding with the abuser’. As Carlos Castaneda says, the Predator has given us its mind and because the Predator has given us its mind we straightaway start oppressing ourselves, abusing ourselves, devouring ourselves. We do all the work ourselves. Another way to put this would be to say that everything gets inverted as a result of us ‘internalizing the framework’. When we ‘internalize the FW’ then everything gets represented in its terms and we don’t have any awareness that there are any other terms, that there are any other way of seeing things, and the way that we’ve been given is a biased one. The dice have been loaded without us knowing it…
The social order is the ‘order’ that is produced by organizing everything in accordance with the FW in question, and thus it is the FW in question; we don’t just live in accordance with this logical system of reference (which would imply that it’s merely a guide, a handy yardstick and nothing more) we live in it – absurd though this might sound. We are after all unable to recognize anything as being ‘real’ unless the FW verifies it as being so and this means that we can’t ever leave it, it means that we can’t ever depart from it into ‘territories unknown’. As far as the framework is concerned there is no unknown – nothing can be conceived of on this basis that is not this basis. The Positive World is produced via the mechanism of self-reference (that’s the only way it can be produced) and the Positive World is the only world we know about, the only world we ever relate to. This means therefore that we don’t live in the real world whilst using the framework of thought as a guide; it means that we live exclusively within the virtual-or-formal domain that is the projection of the FW that thought necessarily assumes in order that it might function as thought in the first place. We live ‘in the abstract’, in other words.
The Formal Domain (which is the projection of the logical template which is the FW) isn’t an external guide, isn’t a map of the territory, but rather it functions as the territory itself. An informational collapse has taken place whereby our way of looking at reality becomes reality, whereby our ‘description of what’s going on’ (i.e., our narrative) becomes ‘what’s going on’. The signifier replaces the signified and no one concerned is any the wiser, just as Baudrillard says. Because it’s not just ‘a guide’ that we’re talking about here but the blueprint of reality itself we can’t ‘go against it’ – we can’t go against it (or question it) because we can’t see that there is anything else other than it. We are given no ‘wriggle room’ as regards perspective, as regards the ability to see things in any other way than the way we already are seeing them, and this is just another way of saying that we are ‘living mechanically’. We have no connection with the unconditioned reality (which is ‘the reality that doesn’t define or control us’) and so we are obliged to inhabit a virtual domain that we can’t see to be ‘only virtual’. It’s the ‘only reality we know’ after all – even if it’s a second-hand version of reality that isn’t actually real at all…
Because the version of reality that is being supplied for us by the abstract system of thought is fundamentally biased this means that we have no capacity to see that bias or know anything about it. We’re stuck fast to the ‘logical surface’ that has been provided for us; we’re ‘stuck fast’ because we can’t see through it, because it is perfectly opaque to us. We can’t reflect on anything, in other words, and this is our situation exactly when we live our lives in the Positive World. This is a ‘fundamentally abusive’ situation, therefore – because we can’t ever reflect on anything (or question anything) we can’t see the deleterious effects or consequences of being confined to the abstract world of logic for what they are, and so – inevitably – we blame ourselves for them. Rather than seeing that the logical domain is itself inescapably glitched (which would be a liberating insight) we feel ashamed of what we see as ‘failure’ on our part and try our best to cover it up. This is a universal tendency, a tendency which we all have – we turn our backs on the part of us that is hurting, the part of us that is ‘malfunctioning’ and do our best to act as if everything were perfectly OK with us. There’s a part of us that just isn’t playing ball, a part of us that is refusing to play the role that is expected of us, but rather than seeing that this ‘role’ is being imposed on us from the outside (and rather than seeing, as Alan Watts says, that it is double-bind that we can’t ever escape from) we take it on ourselves as a manifestation of personal failure. We internalize the failure of the system and recriminate against ourselves accordingly. We give ourselves hell on the system’s behalf…
‘Living the conditioned life’ means that we neglect what really matters and lavish our attention instead upon the false idol, the vulgar emblem, the crude copy, the garish stereotype, the degraded analogue, and so on. The ‘part’ of us that we are betraying here is ‘the part which is actually true’ therefore – we betray the part of us which actually is us! We are required to pretend that ‘who we are is the act and thus ignore who it is that is putting on the act. The copy is celebrated at the expense of the Original. We ‘deny the light whilst worshipping the shadow’. Instead of unconditioned reality – which is a state of being where we are not being lied to and manipulated every step of the way, a state of existence which isn’t the construct or instrument of some exploitative agency – we have to make do with this totally fake, totally artificial parody of the same. We’re required to believe in this parody, this cheap-and-nasty analogue, and in order for us to be able to accept this ‘transplant’ what Henri Bergson calls our ‘spiritual immune system’ has to be knocked out completely. It has to be taken out of the picture. That’s absolutely the only way the simulation is going to be able to function as such – when our autonomy (or sovereignty) has been ‘surgically removed’ and replaced by an implant, replaced by ‘the foreign installation’, We’re required to ignore whatever our spiritual immune system might be saying on the subject – if indeed it is saying anything – and this of course is of absolutely no benefit to us at all! All the benefit goes to the exploitative agency; every advantage goes to the oppressive regime. The ‘invading system’ (which is to say, ‘the Great Amoeba’) mimics us and then gets us to believe that we are ‘the generic copy’, that we are ‘the fake version of ourselves’ – the predator gives us its mind and so we then proceed to abuse and oppress ourselves. We do the system’s dirty work…
If we say that the Unique Original comes as ‘an unconditional gift’ (because it is freely given to all, because there aren’t any ‘inclusion criteria’ involved) then the ‘parody version’ – ‘the generic copy’ – is entirely conditional. It’s not ‘free’ at all but ‘measured out’. When it comes to the unconditional gift which is ‘life’ (or ‘unformatted reality’, or ‘the Dao’, whatever else we might like to call it) then there are no strings attached whatsoever. The Dao is not ‘mean’, is not ‘controlling’ – there are no conditions, no criteria, no rules, no bureaucracy, no ‘external authority that needs to be satisfied’ and this is what makes Nature (which is to say, the uncontrived situation) wholesome / nurturing rather than being deceptive / controlling). The ‘parody version’ of the Original is therefore the conditioned gift, the gift that comes with terms – which is to say, we are given the prize when – and only when – we meet the criteria, when – and only when – we satisfy all the relevant requirements, when – and only when – we ‘tick all the appropriate boxes’, and so on. It’s all a giant bureaucracy in other words; the conditioned reality is a bureaucratic reality because nothing is allowed to happen unless there’s a rule for it. Faced with the unyielding bureaucratic demand that is being made on us, we conform, we comply, we obey – this is the only way we are going to have the good stuff that we believe we need in order to ‘have a life’. We give up freedom on the strength of what we have been. The deal is not an honest one however; the truth of the matter (if only we could see it) is that this is the most dishonest deal going. The whole setup is rigged so that we never will win in the way that we think we will, in the way the system assures us we will (if we play by the rules). Our short-sightedness (the narrow scope of our vision) means we ‘see the cheese but not the trap’. The cheese – tasty though it may look and smell – signals a disastrous future for us if we give in to the temptation to take a sneaky nibble of it…
What we don’t realise (because our outlook is too narrow to appreciate the fact) is that ‘the gift of reality’ (if we might call it that) has to come without any conditions, without any strings attached. That’s the only way it can come – it can’t be bought and sold. Reality itself – being wholly independent of us, being a Law unto Itself, being completely outside of our control – can’t be exploited by some sort of cartel in order to make a profit for an elite group of shareholders. It can’t be monetarized in the way we – as capitalists – would love to monetarize everything in life. There will certainly be no freebies, no ‘hand-outs’, no ‘free lunch’, if we get to be in charge. The unworthy are to be excluded from all the benefits. In the corrupt world in which we live it’s not of course inconceivable that at some point some megacompany will take over the world and want to ‘sell us sunshine’, or ‘sell us the air we breathe’, or whatever, but this just can’t be done. We are thus thwarted in our money-making ambitions. All the talk in the game is about how fantastic it’s going to be when we win, fair by conflating ‘succeeding within the Formal Realm’ with being ‘allowed access to the bounties of reality’; the less than inspirational truth of the matter is that winning or succeeding) will be any more than a category that exists within an unreal game. We long to quit the game despite the fact that we’re always playing it – we play the game in order that we might win the right to quit the game it (which is a motivation that is nothing if not self-contradictory, as James Carse points out), but to really ‘quit the game’ is to go beyond all notions of winning and losing and we don’t want to do that.
No one can monetarize reality (unfortunately for our corporate overlords) but what we can do his monetarize the simulated version thereof. We can ‘sell the copy’, we can ‘sell the generic duplicate’. This wouldn’t work if the consumers could see that it is only a copy of course, and so the thing to do (if we are to ‘pull it off’) is to make sure that no one ever comes across (or hears about) the Genuine Article, which no one can make any money out of. ‘All art is useless’, Oscar Wilde tells us, and so too is the ‘Non-Simulated Environment’. Just as we manage to get around this by commodifying works of art (which means that they now become useful rather than to us) we can also commodify existence itself by turning everything into an elaborate game. All we have to do in order to commodify existence is to create an abstract representation of the same that we can control, that we can ‘parcel out’ when and where it suits us. Instead of dealing with reality (in its original, ‘unmanipulated’ or ‘unformatted’ form) we analogize it so as to produce a simulation that ‘stands for the original at the same as not being it’. This sets the scene for deception to come into the picture – just as soon as we fall into the trap of taking the symbol as being the thing (rather than just representing it in an arbitrary fashion) then we can go right ahead and ‘manipulate reality for our own benefit’.
No one can sell our own intrinsic freedom to us – since it is by definition not something that needs to be (or can be) ‘imported from the outside’ – but what we can do (if this is indeed our ambition) is replace intrinsic freedom with its inverted counterpart (which is extrinsic freedom, or ‘the freedom to play the game without knowing that it’s only a game’). Once we swap actual freedom for the token or analogue variety (which is ‘conditioned freedom’, which is ‘the freedom to obey the rule whilst believing that we’re doing our own thing’) then there’s nothing to get in the way of ‘us selling people their own freedom’ – which is our ultimate aim as venture capitalists. Essentially, we want to ‘have the monopoly on everything’ so that we can be in a position to make money from it. We want to exploit the hell out of everything’, we want to ‘own the rights on the whole world’ so that we can then go ahead and funnel all the benefits to ourselves. This is of course all we’ve ever been interested in – we’re not in the business of ‘giving it away for free’, after all. We’re ‘capitalists’, we’re ‘profit-makers’, we’re ‘takers not givers’…
The most recent step in this thoroughly malign process – we might say – is what Yannis Varoufakis calls ‘techno-feudalism’, which is where the marketplace is removed from ‘the actual real world all around us’ and is relocated on digital platforms which we pay rent on (just as mediaeval serfs used to pay a portion of their crops for the right to use the land, which could potentially be taken away from them at any time). Instead of ridiculous bewigged aristocrats lording it over us we have the ‘tech bros’, therefore. We could go one further than this and say that it’s not just the digital marketplace that we’re talking about but the entire Mind-Created Virtual Reality (which is the digital platform that is operated and run by what David Bohm calls the System of Thought). The MCVR is ‘the simulation of the world which thought produces for us without ever mentioning the fact that it’s only a simulation’. “Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.” says Bohm. The Uncreated World (which is ‘the World without divisions’) has no rules (and hence no ‘Rulers’) above it, whilst the Created (or Produced) World IS governed by rules, IS subject to the dictates of a Tyrant Ruler, etc. This is – we might say – the esoteric significance behind the Biblical idea that Satan has rightful dominion over this world. The World that is made up of compartments (or ‘measurable parts’) is the Fake World, the Construct, the Simulation, and the Simulation is of course the domain of the Great Deceiver…
Image credit – darktemples.com
