The Equilibrium World is the world that comes into being when everything that happens has to happen in a way that agrees with the guidelines, agrees with the standards, agrees with the ideal values that have been specified by that system. In the Equilibrium World <actual> equals <expected>, which means that anything unexpected (anything that hasn’t been accounted for by our formal description of the world) is automatically disregarded as ‘error’. In this situation everything is always has to be specified and nothing exists except in relation to the imposed framework of thought.
This is a managed situation therefore and to live in such a world (to live by the many rules that have been put in place for us) is to be managed out of existence. We’re actually trapped – we’ve been pinned down, we’ve been ‘defined according to someone else’s criteria’. We have been recreated (or ‘reimagined’) according to the system’s whim, according to the system’s fancy, and this is clearly not something that is going to be of any advantage us! We have been subsumed within our own ever-proliferating super-rigid bureaucracy, and this bureaucracy – the bureaucracy of thought – is not going to stop until it has squeezed the last drop of life out of us…
As time goes on this bureaucracy expands and expands, creating new pathways to try to account for whatever possibilities come up that need to be addressed. The number of policies increases. This might feel like an increase in freedom for us but it isn’t – it feels like we’re being provided with extra flexibility with regard to how to respond to the situation but all these new pathways, new possibilities of how to respond, I really the same old thing. We are being controlled, we are being told what to do by the rules We have been controlled and there is no such thing as ‘being given extra freedom’ just as long as we are being managed. No one can give us freedom; no government can legislate for its population to have more freedom because legislation inevitably takes it away. As we read in the Tao Te Ching,
The more laws and restrictions there are. The poorer people become.
To be regulated is to be ‘made into what we are not’ and this is the ultimate form of violence. To be regulated is to have ‘the big, big squeeze’ put on us and when the big, big squeeze is put on us all we can do is yield and keep on yielding (on an indefinite basis). All we can do is keep on succumbing to it, keep on giving way to it, so that at the end of this adaptation process we are able to ‘behave in the way that the system wants us to behave; we are able to ‘be what the system says we have to be’. We are a lot more regulated than we generally believe ourselves to be – every time we act in accordance with our thoughts we are being regulated thoughts (thoughts are regulations, after all). To live out of our thoughts (which is to say, to live with thought as an authority) is to live the regulated life and we live out of our thoughts the whole time. To think is to be regulated and we can’t stop thinking. We can’t switch off the thinking mind off because the act of ‘switching off’ is itself a thought-based operation.
When we try to achieve our goals we are acting in accordance with our thinking, and this means that we are acting in accordance with the regulations that are being applied to us. Even when we think we’re acting on our own behalf we’re being controlled therefore, and to be controlled is to have our essential nature – which is not subject to regulation, which is not there to serve the system – utterly suppressed, utterly squashed. When Kierkegaard said, “If you judge me you negate me” he might equally well have said “If you control or regulate me you negate me – it’s the same thing. To be made into what we are not (and – moreover – to be tricked into believing that ‘we actually are this thing that we’re not’ is to be denied the possibility of authentic (as opposed to simulated) being. A man cannot serve two masters.
Regulation is of course big business – the social world is nothing more than one big system of control. We might like to think that there’s more to it than merely this but there isn’t – control is the name of the game and – what’s more – there’s no actual point to any of it – it’s all about ‘control for the sake of control’, it’s all about ‘restriction for the sake of being restricted’. What’s being controlled is ‘our way of seeing things’, our ‘mental picture of reality’ and this raises the question of how can a logical system which is made up of nothing other than ‘control’, nothing other than ‘restriction’ provide us with a picture of reality when reality – we might say – can only be talked about by saying that it is the complete absence of restriction, the complete absence of limitation? How can OPEN be expressed in a way that is CLOSED?
Instead of talking about this curious thing called ‘reality’ – which we can’t define or describe in any way – we could equivalently express what we were just saying in terms of space. Space can’t be defined (anything that can be defined can’t be spacious) but what we can say about it is that it isn’t limited, that it isn’t constrained to ‘just the one designated possibility’. To constrain some phenomenon by saying that it is just the one unambiguous possibility is to define that phenomenon and space that has been described is no longer space. It’s all clogged up! It’s like a cup that’s full up and which has no room for anything else in it. Reality is thus being turned into a description, a definition, a narrative and descriptions / definitions / narratives aren’t spacious! Re-framing the contradiction that we noted earlier, we can say that the only type of space that the thinking mind can relate to is its idea or picture of it, and the idea or picture of space doesn’t contain any space. The thought of space doesn’t have space in it for anything else other than itself (which is no different to any other thought that I might have). My idea of who I am excludes who I actually am.
The question is this therefore – how can a situation in which there is no spaciousness give rise to a portrayal of space that is so convincing that we take it for the real thing every day of our lives? How can a device or mechanism that has no connection to reality provide us with a picture of reality that is so persuasive that we never look at twice, and which perfectly satisfies our natural curiosity about things? How on earth could this ever have happened? Life is in a state of disequilibrium – it wouldn’t be life otherwise but merely a dead mechanism set on ‘repeat’, the unwinding of a fixed spool of code and nothing else) and yet it is the equilibrium system (which comes down to nothing more than a bunch of rules, a bunch of instructions) that gives us our picture of reality, and this picture of reality is the only type of reality we know about, or indeed care about. The analogue (or simulation) of reality occupies us so completely that we don’t have any attention left over to care about anything else…
Nothing ever happens in the Equilibrium World. Nothing is allowed to happen – if it were then this would be a breach of the rules (since the rules say nothing is allowed other than what the rules say must happen). The only thing that’s allowed to happen is what the rules say must happen, but rules only ever allow themselves. A rule is a rule because it insists that we agree with it, but anything that agrees with the rule IS that rule! The rule only agrees with itself, in other words. This is of course what an Equilibrium State is all about: a value is set and then everything has to agree with it. That’s what an equilibrium system is – it is when ‘everything agrees with everything else’, it is when everything gets homogenized. The thing about this however is that this precludes the possibility of anything new or unscripted ever happening. This is why we can say that ‘nothing ever happens in the equilibrium world’ – all that happens is that stuff gets repeated and we – because of our induced amnesia – don’t remember that we’ve seen it all before. Every time the wheel turns around by 360 degrees we think it’s the very first time…
Nothing ever happens in the EW because change isn’t allowed to happen there. Change is allowed to happen there and if there’s no change then what this means is that there can’t be any such thing as an ‘event’ or an ‘occurrence’! The EW isn’t as great as all that, therefore – far from being great in any way at all it’s totally sterile. Despite this rather significant drawback however we all seem – on the surface of things, at least – to be getting on just fine. Somehow, incredibly, we don’t notice the complete lack of anything ever happening! We fail – in the most spectacular way – to spot this tremendous absence (the absence of anything that is genuinely new). Jean Paul Sartre noticed it however, as we can see from the passage reproduced below –
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.
When we see linear time for what it is (which is to say, when we see the Equilibrium World for what it is) then this is what gives rise to the nausea that JPS writes of in his novel of the same name. Nausea is what we feel when we see the EW (or ‘samsara’) for what it truly is…
The EW is a Big Cheat, in other words. It is The Big Cheat. We could think in terms of a super big, ultra glitzy, mega casino where vast numbers of visitors come and queue up to have all their money taken off them. The only difference is that it is actually possible – however unlikely – to win in a regular casino, whilst no one ever wins in the EW. No one ever returns from samsara with a prize clutched in their little sweaty hands, no one ever invests in the Hyperreal and comes out of it with a tasty profit under their belt. It is a universally promoted (and equally universally believed) narrative that this ‘winning’ is not just a possibility, but the very purpose of life itself (and that the failure to obtain the prize, the failure to turn a profit, the failure to ‘do an impossible thing’, is the ultimate ‘shameful thing’, the ultimate ‘social humiliation’). This endeavour – the endeavour of ‘turning a profit out of samsara’ – is what we as a culture are all about.
Image credit – Jean Paul Sartre c.1955.|© Rene Saint Paul/Rue des Archives/Writer Pictures
