The ‘agreed-upon reality’ which we all inhabit is of course a prison, just as Michel Foucault says. We have no freedom not to inhabit it, in other words; we never had the freedom not to inhabit it, in other words. We don’t live freely in the consensus reality, we live in it compulsorily, we live in it because we are compelled to. We don’t perceive this to be the case because we don’t know that there is any option, because we don’t realise that there is any other possibility apart from inhabiting the agreed-upon reality. We don’t realise that the world we are forcefully inducted into as young children is merely a ‘device’, is merely an ‘agreed-upon thing’.
When we can’t see that the world we live in isn’t the world as it actually is (but only what we ourselves have made of it) then – because we can’t see that it is ‘only a construct’ – the fundamental lack of freedom inherent in this artificial situation becomes completely invisible to us. We can’t know about it and if someone were to come along to try to tell us about it (if they were to try to explain to us that we are ‘prisoners of the construct’, or ‘prisoners of a made up reality’) we would laugh at them, we just wouldn’t believe them. Not in a million years would we believe them.
This then is the basic principle (and it’s a basic principle that no one ever talks about): when we live in a reality that is the result of choice, that is the result of an agreement which we have tacitly made along the way, and we don’t know that there was any choice, and we don’t remember that there was an agreement that had been made, then there is no freedom in this situation. There is no freedom and there is also no freedom to know that there is no freedom. Or to put this another way, when we live in a reality that is a construct (or simulation) and we don’t happen to know that, then we are being totally controlled by some external factor the existence of which we have not the slightest awareness about.
Living out our lives in a prison that we can’t see to be a prison makes a joke of our life, it makes a mockery of it. Whilst it is true that we do tend to complain frequently enough about our situation in life and are in – an indirect way – aware of the limitations that are acting on us, we remain convinced that our conditions can be improved by ‘modifying our situation’, by ‘getting rid of some things and adding (or improving) others’, so to speak. We seek to rectify matters by rearranging the furniture in our prison cell, in other words. We can’t see the big picture and so moving around the furniture is all we’ll ever do. As far as we’re concerned ‘rearranging the furniture’ (or – as we could also say – ‘rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic’) is the only possible answer and we are convinced that we’ll get it right one day. We’re absolutely convinced that this will ‘do the trick’.
Ignorance is bliss, so it is said, only this isn’t really true. Bliss is bliss, whilst ignorance is actually endless misery…! Ignorance only tastes ‘sweet’ to us insofar as it seems – very temporarily – that everything is going swimmingly for us because of our own skilful and diligent efforts. We don’t see the truth, which is that we are continuously heaping misery upon our own heads with our non-stop counterproductive purposeful action. The system is humouring us, in other words – it’s telling us what we want to hear. The way this works is that we get a period of time in which we are facilitated in falsely imagining that our activity is taking us in a good direction, that things are working out for us, that our goals are being achieved, and so on and so forth, and this is the good feeling that we’re playing for. This convivial illusion is what we’re after. We obtain the wonderfully pleasant rewarding feeling that we wanted the price of an equal and opposite unpleasant / punishing feeling however, which doesn’t make any sense at all, of course. But just because it doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense that doesn’t put us off the game we’re playing – it doesn’t put us off at all.
We want to have two things at the same time – we want to be able to get somewhere real as a result of our efforts (we want to have ‘real results’, as it is said) and we also want to have the security of never having to leave the ‘consensus reality’, the ‘agreed-upon truth’. Because it’s impossible to have these two things at the same time we arrive at a kind of ‘compromise’ and that compromise is to stay within the boundaries of what we have all agreed to be true whilst never looking into the consequences of what the consequences of this avoidance might be. What happens is therefore that we opt for security whilst at the same time opting not to see what security actually means, what it inevitably leads to. None of this is conscious, it’s just a comfortable and comforting illusion that we can (and do) fall into – the illusion in question being that it is possible to live entirely within the agreed upon reality whilst at the same time leading a life that is actually meaningful, a life that isn’t just ‘us enacting the same old pointless routine over and over again’.
There is a type of meaning to be had from enacting the same old routine over and over again, and that is the illusory meaning of the game, which is the sense that is provided for us by the game that we are getting somewhere as result of playing it. The game is providing us with a framework of meaning that’s what the game is of course, it is an illusory or imagined framework of meaning. That’s the whole point. The game – any game – presents us with a very basic orientation which is the orientation of ‘better versus worse’, the orientation of ‘improving versus disimproving’, the orientation of ‘succeeding versus failing’, and the meaning that comes out of this orientation is (needless to say) to move in a positive direction and not a negative one. This isn’t intrinsic meaning that we’re talking about here – it’s meaning that we have taken upon ourselves from the outside so that we can play the game. We then work as hard as we possibly can to obtain the good outcome rather than the bad one. This is extrinsic motivation therefore – it is ‘meaning that has been assigned from the outside’ and the thing about this is that assigned meaning (or assigned value) isn’t really meaning (or value) at all…
Extrinsic (or Assigned) Meaning is meaningless simply because it has absolutely nothing to do with us. EM has nothing to do with anything other than itself, being based as it is on nothing more than an abstract set of rules, an abstract set of rules that could just have easily been any other set of rules. What we’re talking about here is ‘hidden symmetry’ therefore and the way that games work is by denying this symmetry, by covering it over. Alternatively, we can say that the way games work is by presenting us with an asymmetrical situation (which is to say, ‘better versus worse’) that it implicitly claims to be ‘the way things actually are’. This is the Demiurgic Principle, we might say – an artificial situation is arbitrarily created, and on the foot of this manoeuvre, on the foot of this spurious act of creation, it is claimed that the asymmetrical situation that has been produced has not been obtained arbitrarily and that it is – on the contrary – the only way things could ever have been.
Another way of talking about the Demiurgic Principle is to say that it is the inversion of responsibility (i.e., ‘giving it away rather taking it on’) that Berger and Luckman speak of as the opus proprium being misrepresented as the opus alienum. When this inversion takes place then we end up with a framework of meaning which we can conveniently orientate ourselves around – a framework that is ‘superficially meaningful but actually completely meaning-less’. It only looks as if it’s meaningful, in other words. ‘Disguised meaninglessness’ (or ‘camouflaged redundancy’) is what Assigned Value (or Extrinsic Meaning) is all about – Assigned Meaning only seems appears meaningful insofar as we take it as not being assigned, insofar as we take it as not being something that has been ‘put there on purpose’, but no matter how we take it, no matter how we choose to interpret it, the bottom line is that the ‘meaning’ has been put there on purpose, that it has been assigned, that it is totally artificial…
I can assign meaning any way I please – which comes across therefore as a superficial form of freedom – but in doing so I create a situation that is meaningless without me being able to see that it is! In doing so I create a null world for myself to live in. The superficial freedom very effectively hides the absolute lack of freedom, in other words. We can never be free when our idea of what ‘being free means’ is itself a construct that has been provided for us by some shadowy external agency, after all! I’m free to assign value wherever I please but the hidden drawback here is that no matter where I assign the value it’s still going to be ‘me assigning it’ (or ‘me agreeing to go along with it’). And this means that the value or meaning which I am assigning isn’t actually real at all. Nothing assigned is real, by definition! Nothing assigned has any meaning of its own and this is a limitation that I can’t escape – I can assign meaning wherever I want but at the same time as creating it I have to create ‘the equal and opposite value’. It’s one and the same action – by asserting positive meaning I am also assigning negative meaning. If I happen to be on a sandy beach somewhere then I can create a sandcastle wherever I want on that beach, but only at the price of creating an ‘inverted sandcastle’ the same time. I’m robbing Peter to pay Paul and the problem with this is that having paid Paul I now have to rob him in order to pay Peter. It’s a ‘loop’, it’s a ‘never-ending problem’, in other words…
Image credit – stablecog.com
