A very basic – the most basic – form of psychological bootstrapping is where we do a thing and then say that we didn’t do it, that it was ‘already there’, and then proceed to orientate ourselves round it, take our cues from it, determine the reality of our situation by it, etc.
This is what David Bohm was getting at when he said that thought creates divisions within itself and acts as if those divisions are already there. It is also the strategy that Berger and Luckmann were drawing attention to in their book The Social Construction of Reality. This is how we ‘bootstrap ourselves into existence’, therefore. Thought bootstraps the known world into existence by seeing it through a filter that it itself devised but which – at the same time – it completely refuses to acknowledge as being its own construct, its own device. We human beings bootstrap the entire social collective reality into existence (in a completely unsupported way) by making up a ‘moral framework’ (a ‘culture’) and then acting as if we didn’t make up these norms (in a random or haphazard way) but rather they are – on the contrary – self-evidently true, that they were true all along and that we ought not ever to doubt them. We become frankly scandalized by breaches of the code’, though the code doesn’t really matter a damn (because it’s just a game). This is the only trick we have so we use it time and time again; it’s ‘the only trick we have’, but it is also a supremely effective one (so we stick with it).
If we wanted to have some kind of general way of expressing this ubiquitous trick (this cheap-but-effective strategy to flip everything on its head) we could therefore say that we bootstrap our subjective reality into existence by playing (finite) games. The key point to understand about a game is that it is freely entered into, as James Carse points out in Fine And Infinite Games. Games are always arbitrary in nature, despite the fact that they promote themselves as being 100% obligatory. There’s nothing saying we have to play the game (i.e., there’s no rule saying that we have to do what the rule says, but the way the game works – the only way it can work – is if we say that there absolutely IS such a rule as ‘the rule which says we have to obey the rule’. According to the game there is no such thing as ‘unconditional freedom’; according to the simulation there is no such thing as ‘the unsimulated reality’. This untrue claim is a necessary condition for the game to be a game, for the simulation to work as a simulation.
The manoeuvre that we’re using here is the manoeuvre of denying the existence of intrinsic freedom, therefore. We create in our heads a universe in which there is ‘no such thing as freedom’ (which is a most peculiar thing to consider) and then use this artificially inverted situation as the basis for our (conditioned) existence, as the basis for our whole ‘way of life’. We hide our own intrinsic freedom from ourselves so that we might play the game, which is what James Carse calls self-veiling. This might seem to be ‘putting the problem to bed’ but it isn’t. It’s putting the problem to bed maybe but only in a strictly temporary way, a way that is no more than a shallow deception. It’s not so much ‘a bed’ we’re talking about here as a springboard since the problem we’re supposedly laying to rest is guaranteed to jump up again the minute we turn our back. There is a huge big glitch right there in front of our noses in other words but we point-blank refuse to see it – this is our strategy and it’s not a very subtle one. Resolutely ignoring what’s under our very noses it’s clearly not ‘a subtle strategy’ and the ridiculous crudeness of this so-called ‘solution’ is therefore guaranteed to rebound on us. The cruder (and therefore more violent) the gimmick the more unpleasant the unwanted consequences are going to be.
The glitch that we are ignoring is this: if we wish, we can say that there absolutely IS a rule telling us that we have to obey the rule but – having done this – we find that we are trapped in a never-ending ‘repair job’, we find that we are now tied into a never-ending ‘PR campaign’. Every time we deny the freedom that we inalienably have to obey the rule or not obey, to play or not play the game, we have to invent a rule where there wasn’t one before – we have to invent a rule telling us that there is a rule (a meta-rule or ‘meta-instruction’) which tells us that we have no choice about obeying the first or original rule. This – as we have already said – seems to do the job just as long as we don’t look too hard into it, just so long as we don’t see the wider picture of what’s going on. If we take a look at the wider picture then we see that this ‘gimmick’ doesn’t really do the job because no sooner have we invented the second rule (which is the meta-instruction telling us that we have no freedom to not obey the first instruction) then then we have to add in a third rule (which is a ‘meta-meta-instruction’) saying that we don’t have the freedom to disregard the first one. We are obliged to ‘keep on denying our own freedom at every step’, in other words. We have to do this in order to keep on playing the game…
This is the problem with denial generally, of course. If we have to go to the trouble of denying something (which is a very big deal, requiring massive investment and commitment) then clearly what we’re denying must be true – we don’t need to be in denial of untrue things, there’s no need to invest in that at all. If something is true – on the other hand – then it’s going to carry on being true no matter how many times we deny it! Denial is thus a never-ending job – it’s a never-ending job that can never achieve what it sets out to achieve (which means that it is a failed and failing strategy even within its own terms). We will be compelled to struggle and struggle in a perfectly doomed fashion at the same time we also ‘struggle and struggle’ not to see that the endeavour we’re so obsessively engaged in is perfectly futile. We are therefore always haunted – albeit usually on an unconscious level – that what we’re saying so emphatically (what we’re claiming to be true so plaintively) is sooner or later going to show itself up as a big fat lie. This fear will of course never leave us – it will of course never leave us just so long as we’re trying to deny the truth! Our pet fear is thus ‘the truth’ – fear and truth are the same thing for us. What we fear so very much is ‘what actually is,’ and no matter how much we might try to spin it this is not a good position to find ourselves in. It’s impossible to devise a worse one.
Because of our absolute terror with regard to the actual truth of our situation we’re going to play stupid therefore, we’re going to act dumb. We’re going to act as if we don’t know what’s going on and then – having done this – the next thing is that we’re going to reduce (or shrink) ourselves so that we are the act, so that we are the pretence. We are then no more than the act we are putting on and this translates into ‘being unfree but no longer able to see it’. This is how we pull off the trick of eliminating intrinsic freedom, therefore – to start off with we ‘follow the rules’ whilst a bit later on – when the habit has taken root – we end up in the situation where the rules are driving us in everything we do, without us knowing it. We think the rules are us, in other words. We don’t have any insight into this unhappy situation, and we don’t want to know it either. There is no way we can ‘live the conditioned life’ whilst at the same time realize that we are being driven by rules, driven by an external agency – this just wouldn’t work.
We manage this by ‘rewriting the meaning of freedom’ (by ‘reimagining’ it, as it is said). Instead of seeing freedom in terms of ‘us not being bound by predetermined patterns or rules’ (or in terms of ‘us not being defined by some external authority’) we see it in terms of us being able to satisfactorily fulfil these predetermined patterns, in terms of us not being obstructed in the pursuit of the goals that thought tells us are so very important for us to obtain. On a very small or limited scale (where we are in a box but can’t see that we are) ‘obeying rules’ does (paradoxically!) pass for ‘freedom’ but it only does so because we’re totally lacking in perspective. If this is freedom then it’s very pale and sickly version, however – it’s ‘the freedom to do as we are told’, it’s ‘the freedom to be controlled and yet all the same think that we’re free because we never try to act independently’. It’s ‘the freedom to deceive ourselves’, therefore. We are in this case enjoying a form of ‘virtual freedom’ that isn’t in any way real but which looks as if it is just as long as we never test it. ‘Virtual Freedom’ comes about as a result of us not seeing that there is in fact a Bigger Picture – a bigger picture in which it can clearly be seen that we are being controlled by rules without acknowledging it. This then is the unconscious modality.
What the unconscious modality boils down to is – as we have said – the denial of intrinsic freedom. IF is denied so that we are obliged to make do with the extrinsic variety instead. When we can’t see the Greater Context – which is perfect indeterminacy (or perfect symmetry) – then radical uncertainty is replaced by the trivial analogue of it which has the consequence that ‘successfully fitting into the predetermined scheme of things’ becomes the only sort of freedom that we’re capable of knowing about. Anything beyond this so-called ‘boon’ – the boon of being facilitated in thinking we’re free by the system – is beyond us. We only care about immediate relief, we only care about the short term. In the Unconscious Mode the only thing on our mind is ‘obtaining sweet relief from the coercive pressure that we’re under’ and so we give this outcome the highest possible valuation – we see this as the ultimate and we call it ‘winning’ or ‘succeeding’. Because escaping extrinsic pressure is accorded the very highest possible valuation this necessarily means that freedom must be subservient to this thing that we misleadingly call ‘winning’, it means that freedom must play second fiddle to achieving the outcome that we’re being pushed to achieve. The only freedom that means anything to us is the freedom to do what (we think) we want in an unimpeded or unchallenged way. This might sound reasonable enough (just as long as we ignore the fact that it’s not really us who wants the outcome) but that’s only because we’re seeing everything backwards; the only way we understand freedom is ‘the freedom to play the game that we have been given to play’ but because the game is a scripted or predetermined situation, what we’re talking about here is the ‘freedom to be predetermined’. We’re talking about protecting ‘our right to continue to be controlled by an external authority without us knowing it’, therefore; we’re ‘standing up for our inviolable right to remain puppets-who-think-they-they-are-free’.
The Lower Analogue of Freedom is ‘the freedom for whatever game it is that we’re playing not to be a game but to be – as far as we’re concerned – the actual God-given reality’. No matter how strenuously we promote the lower analogue of freedom it’s never going to be a real thing however – It can never be a real thing because (as we’ve said) what we’re wishing for is a situation where ‘all that there is is rules’ and that is a flat impossibility. It’s the flattest of all possibilities. The situation where every rule comes with a meta-rule to validate it (a secondary or ‘add-on’ rule which tells us that we have to obey the first rule) and where every meta-rule comes as part of a package with the meta-meta rule (which instructs us to unthinkingly obey the meta-rule which instructs us to make sure that we obey the rule, and so on and so forth) and this scenario is clearly a closed door. It’s a joke. It’s not going to work – negative freedom – in the most fundamental way possible – does not work. It doesn’t work and it never will work and yet we’re not going to give it up (if we can at all help it). We won’t address the problem.
‘It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.’ says James Carse. Similarly, we could say that whatever it is that comes to pass must do so without there being any coercion involved, without there being any logical precedent, so to speak. When everything ‘follows on’ from something else, in a derivative way, then there are no genuine ‘events’; if there is coercion, if there is control, if there is a precedent then what’s happening as a result (or rather what seems to be happening) is ‘a non-event disguised as an event’, ‘an illusion disguised as honest-to-goodness reality’. Forcing or controlling is bootstrapping plain and simple therefore – it’s a ‘cheap trick’, it’s a ‘gimmick’. It’s the that yields that past only transient benefit. Bootstrapping brings about what we might call temporary advantage, temporary relief from the pressure that we’re under but the (so-called) advantage is bought at the price of an equal and opposite disadvantage (relief from mental suffering is only achieved at the price of even more mental suffering in the future, as every psychotherapist will happily testify). This is what we might call THE fundamental principle in psychotherapy – the principle that says we can’t bulldoze our way out (‘What we resist persists’, says Jung). We can’t either escape the problem or fix it because both responses perpetuate what we’re trying to fix, what we’re trying to escape from. Resistance equals bootstrapping, in other words.
When we resist, we automatically create a false (bootstrapped) reality that our consciousness gets trapped in and believes to be still ‘the real thing’. No matter what we do to Hyperreality, it remains nothing but Hyperreality, it remains a ‘cheap trick’. We can twist it, burn it, pinch it, stretch it, jump up and down on it (or whatever else) but it’s still the same old Hyperreality no matter what. Or to put it another way, we can leave where we are, and ‘go somewhere else’, but underneath the spin it’s the same old place we’re in. That’s why we can’t ‘kill the ego’, as Krishnamurti says – we can (or so it seems) kill the ego but as soon as we do it immediately ‘reboots’ itself. Every act the self that engages in is an ‘ouroboric act’ – when it acts so as to end itself it straightaway (and unintentionally) creates itself (via the bootstrapping mechanism). When the self ends itself it creates itself at the same time since it is the one who is carrying out the action. In terms of ‘game playing’ we can express this by principle by saying that ‘quitting the game’ is a legitimate move in the game that we are trying to quit…
Image credit – pinterest.com
