Technical knowledge is the ‘lower analogue’ of wisdom. In this high-tech world of ours (which we adulate so much) it’s all about technical knowledge, of course and technical knowledge is – for us – simply a ‘means to an end’. Having knowledge of the physical world gives us the ability to control what is happening to us, the ability to get things to happen the way we want them to happen (rather than any other way). We therefore perceive our advantage to lie in advancing our technology to the point where all problems are finally resolved and we can – as a result – enjoy our lives to the maximum. That’s the theory, anyway, and it’s a theory we never question…
Theory is one thing, reality another, however. This ‘hypothesis’ of ours – dear to our hearts as it might be – couldn’t be more wrong. It’s wrong as wrong could be. The more technical our lives become the more miserable we are; there is simply no such thing as ‘technology that can make us happy’ – the notion is quite laughable. Technology works by facilitating the predictable and speedy attainment of the outcomes that we value, the outcomes we desire – the faster and more reliably we can obtain the results we want the better we like it, but this can never be more than a matter of ‘convenience’. This is purely a matter of convenience and what is convenient will never lead to happiness, to peace of mind. It assuages our terrible impatience, that’s all. It spoon-feeds us.
In a world where our technology were to be advanced enough impatience wouldn’t matter, however; it wouldn’t be a problem (since all our wishes, no matter how trivial, would be instantaneously fulfilled) but – despite how wonderful this might sound – this is very far from being a ‘healthy’ situation. It’s not a healthy situation because we become utterly dependent upon the mechanical world that is maintaining our existence, and the state of ‘being dependent’ is the perfect antithesis of mental health. When we are adapted to the mechanical world – which is the world that reliably services all our needs – then it could be said that we possess a kind of analogue of mental health, the analogue being the state of complete adaptation to the system. When we are successfully adapted to the system then we are of course in the optimal position to avail of all the benefits that it has to offer.
Perfect adaptation to the system might be our analogue (or substitute) for the mental health but (as we’ve just said) this doesn’t mean that there’s anything healthy about it! What’s actually happening here is that we are defining mental health in an inverted way. What this means – in practise – is that we’re making ourselves like the world that we have adapted ourselves to. This is what adaptation means – in order to obtain the maximum benefit from the system we have to mimic it, we have to be congruent with it. If we want to get the very most benefit from it that we possibly can then we have to accord 100% with the logic of the system we are adapting to, we have to reflect it perfectly, without any error. When we reflect something perfectly then what this means – in plain language – is that we become whatever it is that we have adapted to. We become faithful copies of the social template.
This is the phenomenon of identification, therefore – the process of identification being that process by which we ‘become what we are not’. I might believe myself to be a cat, or perhaps a teapot, when I’m not, for example. Another way of putting this is to say that the process of identification causes us to be the most confused we could ever be! When we are passively identified then what this means is that we are always starting off from the wrong place, and not only are we ‘starting off from the wrong place’, we’re starting off from a place that doesn’t actually exist. Even putting it like this isn’t making the point strongly enough however – to simply say that we are’ confused’ really isn’t doing any justice to our situation at all.
When we place ourselves in the position of being able to extract the maximum benefit from the system that we’ve created to cater for our conditioned needs (which is to say, the needs that the system itself has implanted in us so as to make itself indispensable to us) then what we are reflecting (what we are being ‘the same as’) is essentially a machine, and so what’s going on here is that we are identified with a machine, or ‘logical system’. Being turned into a machine is thus the price we pay for convenience! This ought not to come as too much of a surprise to us, of course we all know very well that by adapting ourselves to the modern world we have narrowed ourselves down so much as to be completely useless outside of our specialised niche. No one’s going to argue this point -that’s the deal that we have done, and we all know it. We’re ‘specialists’ and the thing about being a specialist is that we know very little about anything else, anything that doesn’t relate to our speciality. We neither know nor care…
This wouldn’t necessarily be such a bad thing if what we were specialised in was a real thing, was of real value, but this isn’t the case – what we have specialised in – no matter what our position in society – is a societal game. That’s what culture is, after all – it’s a made-up thing that we all agree to take seriously. What else would it be? If we are members of society at all (in what capacity doesn’t matter) then we are ‘specialists in a game’, ‘specialists in a thoroughly artificial situation’. We are adapted to some kind of ‘reality’ that isn’t actually real and the price of this is that we don’t know anything at all about anything else apart from this unreal situation. This is precisely how the game that we call society works, it’s the only way it ever could work – we all get together to agree that something is true when it isn’t, and then we forget that it was us who agreed to it! The result of this nifty little manoeuvre is that everything gets inverted: the unreal becomes real and the real becomes unreal. This is the spell that we are under in everyday life, this is the state of psychological unconsciousness.
The analogue of mental health is ‘being optimally adapted to the game’, therefore. From the perspective of the game (from the point of view of the simulation) this makes perfect sense – if the game is actually reality, then of course it’s mentally healthy (or ‘sane’) to be properly tuned into it. If – on the other hand – what we take to be the real world is merely a simulation (and if as we have just said the simulation is an inversion of the true thing) then it’s going to be a different story entirely. In this case, we are fundamentally confused, fundamentally deluded, and we’re not going to get any benefit from our adaptedness whatsoever. It’s not a ‘benefit ‘we’re going to get here but the complete reverse of it – we’re going to be hugely, incalculably the worse off for confusing the mind-created simulation for what is supposedly being simulated. Far from being ‘advantageous’, our situation is frankly disastrous.
We can come back at this point to what we started off saying about technical knowledge being the lower analogue of wisdom – in a universe where everything is measurable and describable, where everything always has to be in a determinate or fixed state, then we would be able to say, quite legitimately, that knowledge and wisdom are not ‘two different things’. They would be interchangeable in this case – the former would not be a lower (or degenerate) analogue of the latter. This is not the universe we live in, however, as any physicist would be happy to point out. We might be forgiven for thinking that would the world we exist in is one that can be definitively described (or ‘pinned down with concepts’) but this is – we might say – a ‘deception’ – when the energy goes out of the universe (like a loaf of freshly baked bread that has been taken out of the oven to cool down) then it settles down into determinate states, but these states are in no way representative of the actual nature of reality. To quote Stephen Hawking on the Weinberg-Salam Theory –
The Weinberg–Salam theory exhibits a property known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. This means that what appear to be a number of completely different particles at low energies are in fact found to be all the same type of particle, only in different states. At high energies all these particles behave similarly. The effect is rather like the behavior of a roulette ball on a roulette wheel. At high energies (when the wheel is spun quickly) the ball behaves in essentially only one way – it rolls round and round. But as the wheel slows, the energy of the ball decreases, and eventually the ball drops into one of the thirty-seven slots in the wheel. In other words, at low energies there are thirty-seven different states in which the ball can exist. If, for some reason, we could only observe the ball at low energies, we would then think that there were thirty-seven different types of ball!
Erwin Schrodinger is of course making the same point when he says, ‘The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real’. It’s hard for us to see the physical universe as being merely ‘an appearance’ but it is all the same. When we get to be ‘wise’ then this is what we will see! If we wish to view things in a purely superficial way then we can indeed say that the world is fixed, solid, predictable, permanent and so on, and we can base our entire way of life of living life on this dubious premise. When we are in this modality of being then everything becomes about consolidating our position, everything becomes about ‘making sure that we’re getting the very most of our situation’ (as we superficially understand that situation to be, at least). We are optimizing control and security, in other words. We are also optimising our ‘two-dimensional mental image of ourselves’, our ‘taken for granted concept of ourselves’. This makes great sense just as long as our understanding of things is correct and there isn’t something big that we have left out of our calculations in our haste to understand what life is about, but if our understanding is ‘wrong’, is ‘not complete’, is ‘missing out something very important’, then it’s a different story altogether. In this case we’re in trouble. In this case we’re in for a very unwelcome surprise…
In the West we have opted 100% – and with absolute total super-unreflective commitment – to the superficial view, the ‘non-profound’ view, and this corresponds to what we are calling ‘the technical knowledge approach to life’. This is what we have (unwisely!) put all our money on. We don’t have any actual wisdom, therefore – not even a shred of it. In our great haste to benefit ourselves, we have identified our goal and now we’re going for it for all we’re worth. We’re going for it ‘hell for leather’ in the fond belief that this is where our advantage lies, that this is where our happiness lies. We tell ourselves that everything will ‘come good’ for us when we finally attain it – it has to come good for us we say, addicted to false optimism as we are. ‘Failure is not an option’ is our well-worn mantra but our so-called ‘optimism’ (our ‘positive thinking’) is really just ‘denial by any other name’. We are denying the appalling enormity of our collective mistake, and the worst things get the more we deny it!
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