The Abuser Mind (In All Its Glory)

Aug 21. 2026

The Abuser Mind gives you yourself, your identity, your ‘world’ — it gives you your everything.

The Abuser Mind gives you the game that you have to play; it controls you, not because of what it tells you, but because of what it doesn’t. It controls you by not telling you that the game it has forced you to play is a game. It controls you by not telling you that you don’t have to take part, that you never had to take part…

This is the one thing the AM will never tell you — that you are perfectly free NOT to play the game. As G.I. Gurdjieff tells us, ‘Freedom is taken, never given’. There’s no one out there ‘handing out freedom’ to whoever wants it — the abuser / exploiter doesn’t give freedom away and so if we are to be free then we have to see to it ourselves. We can’t wait for someone else to sort it out for us, we can’t just wait around passively hoping that he’s going to have a change of heart (or clinging to the belief that he is our friend really, underneath it all, despite all appearances). We have to renounce our pathological obedience to our mechanical master, we have to ‘stand up to the bully’, we have to ‘call out the abuser’. We will only be free when we find the courage within us to call the bluff of the Great Tyrant.

All the Abuser Mind has to do (in order that it might control us completely, in order that it might get us to dance whatever dance it wants on the end of our strings) is not give us this one piece of information — the information that the world it presents for us is not the real world but a construct. It’s all staged, the whole thing is merely a ‘reality TV set’ (just like in the Truman Show), but we have to be carefully protected from this knowledge. This is the only way it can work — there is no way to create a virtual world and yet at the same time provide the information that this is what we have done; as we have already said, the only way to create a virtual world is to not provide the information that this is only a virtual world. The key point to remember when telling a lie is — as every successful liar knows — that you mustn’t let on that this is what you’re doing. When you lie you mustn’t say that you are, you mustn’t be transparent about it. A lie that declares itself for what it is isn’t ‘a lie’, it’s the truth…

The AM works by lying all the time, by lying about everything — it provides a Positive Reality for us, in other words. All positive realities are lies, and all lies give rise to positive realities. The only thing that isn’t a lie is when nothing is said, when nothing is stated, when no descriptions or definitions have been put forward. The only thing that isn’t a lie is the Unstated. What we’re saying here is rather curious, to say the least — what we’re saying is that all formal descriptions or explanations of ‘what’s going on’ are abusive systems, which is to say, systems that undermine us and sneakily erode our well-being whilst leading us to believe that they are offering us a service, that they are doing something for us. Systems promote themselves as being our tools (as being our ‘servants’) whilst the truth of the matter is that we are their tools, that we are their servants. They might start off serving us, but this very quickly switches over on us, and we never notice the difference. If any given system or description of the world were honest about the fact that it exploits us for the sake of its own integrity (which is to say, that it erodes or undermines our essential well-being) then there would be no problem — there would be no problem in this case because we simply wouldn’t have anything to do with it. The false promise of benefit (or reward) is essential, therefore — every abusive system sells itself — at least initially — as our friend and benefactor.

The benefit we obtain as a result of buying into a positive (which is to say, ‘exhaustively defined’) world is that we have some sort of ground to work from, some sort of foundation or platform to build upon. Unless reality can be described in a ‘non-metaphorical way’ — so that we know for sure where we stand and what we stand on — we can’t get on with things in the mechanical or rule-based / logically consistent way that we are habituated to, and if we can’t do this (if we can’t trundle along according to a predictable formula) then our existence as this generic self or identity is simply over. No thread of logical consistency means no self and as much as we believe that we absolutely are this consistent or repetitive ego, we absolutely need to be under the power of the tyrant, the bully, the pitiless heartless abuser. This is a deal we can’t walk out of, in this case. All we can do is keep on hoping that it will somehow work out for us.

This puts a radically different perspective on things (needless to say) — we are the helpless victims of the Abuser Mind for sure, trying to placate it this way, trying to placate it that way, desperately hoping — as a result of our manoeuvrings — to obtain the approval or validation which — ultimately — we never will obtain, but actually this is exactly what we want (even though we will never admit it). The arrangement whereby we get to be controlled down to the very last degree by a bureaucratic system that cares absolutely nothing for our actual well-being suits us perfectly — on a level we very rarely get any insight into — since this, as we’ve just said, is the only way we can get to live the life of the extrinsic self (which is the virtual entity that likes to think it is the boss but which is really just the ‘impotent stooge of the mechanical system that is operating it’).

We like being told what to do, in other words. We love it even though we also love to complain. We like it that we don’t have any real responsibility for what’s going on; we like to shrug our shoulders and come out with such well known time-honoured phrases such as “Nothing to do with me, guvnor” or “That’s the rules, buddy…” or “I don’t make the rules, I only follow them”. Although we have a well-developed blind spot in relation to this inner contradiction — the contradictoriness of ‘wanting our cake and yet expecting to eat it’, the contradictoriness of ‘wanting the glory of being a free agent’ and yet also ‘wanting the easy life of the paid employee who only ever has to obey instructions’ at the same time — and the blind spot we’re talking about here serves us because it allows us to do exactly that. It allows us to have our cake and eat it. We’re onto a neat little number here, therefore — we have ‘the best of both worlds’ and we’re not about to give it up.

All of this brings us to what we might call ‘the crux of the matter’, which has to do with the creation of the self or ego (which – in turn – comes down to the relationship between freedom and euphoria, along with the huge tendency that there is here to sacrifice the former for the latter. When the extrinsic self starts off on its career then everything is golden, everything is at our fingertips, everything is just ‘waiting to follow our cue’. The universe exists purely to fulfil our wishes — there’s no other value in it. All value belongs to me: whatever I do or think is automatically justified, automatically wonderful. The world is there for the taking (and if you take it then you’re ‘the boss’). As soon as this sense of potential or promise is acted upon however then everything turns around on us – the tables are instantly turned – so to speak so – that instead of being ‘the doer’ we become ‘the done’, instead of being ‘the thinker’ we become ‘the thought’. Instead of being the ‘hero of the story’ we’ve become the ‘stooge’, the ‘mark’, the ‘patsy’ – we have become thought’s unhappy gimp.

Before we act (so as to realise or secure the possibility that we see in front of us) we make a choice – we make the choice to do whatever it is that we want to do, we make the choice to ‘enact our move’. Whilst it is true that there is indeed this remarkable field of potential, this uncharted world of infinite promise, to make the move to secure the possibility, to ‘make the thing happen that we want to happen’ collapses the field of potential and locks us up into a predetermined repetitive pattern, however. It locks us into the situation where ‘the same old ding-dong’ is immediately and unvaryingly followed up with yet more of ‘the same old ding-dong’ – and so on into infinity. In order to make the thing happen that we want to happen (in order to actualise the specific possibility that we have in mind) we have to act in a particular way, we have to follow a plan or strategy (which we promptly become the prisoners of). We lunge at the possibility so as to secure it, and this is where it all collapses – symmetry is broken, OPEN is (subjectively, at least) converted into CLOSED. In Dickian terms, the ‘Palm Tree Garden’ becomes the ‘Black Iron Prison’.

We are so used to focusing on the externals that we don’t give any attention at all to what’s going on in the background when we embark upon our career of being ‘the Doer’, being ‘the Purposeful Actor’. what’s going on in the background out of sight is that we are assuming – without realising it – that there actually IS ‘the one who is making the purposeful move, the one who is striving to attain the purposeful doer, the chooser. We’re assuming the existence of. The point here is that we’re ‘stuck fast in a tautology’, we’re ‘lost in the stagnant morass of self-referentiality’. When we select a goal (when we focus on what it is we specifically want to change) then we also select the viewpoint which gives rise to this goal, the viewpoint which gives rise to the perception that the change in question is advantageous. We can’t not do this since we’re if we were not to look at things in the specific way that the goal in question requires (in order that it might be meaningful to us as a goal). If this VP were to be ‘dropped’ then the whole picture would then be different – what we previously saw as ‘the goal’ would no longer matter to us. <Winning> in a game means nothing outside of that highly constrained (or ‘artificial’) context.

When the ‘angle’ is changed, so too is what we see. What we’re talking about here is the continuum of logic, in other words, and in the COL ‘what we see’ is not different from ‘the way that we have of seeing it’. The whole thing’s a tautology. Hence Krishnamurti says: ‘The fact is that the observer is the observed. This is not an intellectual concept, but a fact’. The observer and the observed, the thinker and the thought are both manifestations of the same logical continuum and what this means is that nothing that the observer might say about the observed can ever mean anything. Nothing the thinker might think about ‘what is being thought about’ means anything at all – we’re not dealing with anything true here, we’re simply ‘messing about in Hyperreality’. We’re ‘playing with our toys’. We’re ‘having fun in the Land of Make-Believe’.