We live our lives – whether we know it or not, and we rarely do – in accordance with what might be called the ‘Thing-Based Paradigm’. If we have any rational / logical theory of the world at all (which is to say, if we think it’s this, or if we think it’s that) then we are fully-paid up subscribers to the Thing-Based Paradigm – it doesn’t matter what the particulars of our theory (or belief, for that matter, since a belief is simply a theory that we never test) might be, it’s all the same thing. The details very relevant, nothing more than window dressing. The important thing is to see through to the essential principle of what’s going on here. The TBP always boils down to the TBP (and nothing else) – it’s ‘fixed’, it’s ‘got nowhere else to go’.
It’s hard to appreciate what a preposterous thing the notion of something being ‘fixed’ actually is in this context, what a joke it is. In order for something (anything) to be fixed (or located) there has to be an Abstract Framework – the whole endeavour of ‘fixing’ (or ‘locating’, or ‘defining’) relies absolutely on there being a framework, plainly. More than this, we could say that the abstract procedure which is ‘fixing’ (which is to say, the procedure of ‘obtaining exhaustive information about something’) is an extension of the Framework, is ‘the framework in action’. The FW is what does the defining and without the operation of ‘defining’ there can be no things – we can’t define anything without an associated FW and at the same time the notion of a FW wouldn’t be meaningful if there weren’t things to put in it, ‘counters’ (or ‘tokens’) of some kind to arrange or organize in accordance with it. This therefore leads us straight into paradox since it is the FW that creates the ‘object’) and yet at the same time we’re using this framework to prove that the object in question actually exists…
The Thing-Based Paradigm – obviously enough! – relies on there being such a thing as ‘a thing’; this is clearly the case since the if there were ‘no such things as things’ then we wouldn’t be able to make this vexed business of ‘being a thing’ into the lynchpin for our whole way of understanding the world. Or rather, we could, but it would be absurd to do so. For a ‘thing’ to qualify as such it needs to be fixed – it can’t randomly change its character or flicker in and out of existence, or mutate endlessly in a radically unpredictable way, or anything like that. For a thing to be a thing it can’t behave chaotically – on the contrary, it has to obey the rules at all times. It just has to ‘be what it is’ – plain and simple, no surprises. It has to be what we already know it to be, it has to be what we routinely describe it as being. In short, it can’t have any strange behaviours that we can’t explain or else it wouldn’t be a thing. It wouldn’t be a thing, but rather it would be ‘something strange pretending to be a thing’. It would be a wolf in sheep’s clothing…
‘Things’ aren’t strange – things are never strange – and this should tip us off that what we’re taking to be such aren’t actually real but are only our own sterile mental projections. There’s nothing at all strange about our mental constructs and so there’s also nothing strange about the world that thought makes, the Reified World (which is the world that is made up of ‘this, that and the other’). The Reified World is what we get when everything gets slotted neatly into our premade conceptual categories with nothing left over to ask any questions about. This is how we get rid of all strangeness. In order to pull this trick off (in order to create the Thing-Based Universe) we need therefore to have an unquestionable (or inviolate framework); the so-called things’ that we are constructing our subject world with aren’t independent of that framework (as we assume), but rather a projection or extension of it, which is of course where we run into the paradox. If we only know a thing to be a thing because of the framework then the so-called ‘thing’ is actually nothing more than ‘the FW in disguise’. If the framework that we’re using as a lens to study the world is actually responsible for producing the things that go to make it up then clearly whatever we think we know we absolutely don’t.
The Thing-Based Paradigm (within which we construct all our theories, all our beliefs, all our hypotheses, all of our constructs) is a joke therefore. It’s a big fat joke. The only way it could possibly hold good for us (and not be revealed as a big fat joke) is if we treat it as Holy Dogma and never ever question it. This is where the ‘Inviolate’ bit comes in – the Game Player can’t have access to the coding that creates the game without at the same time gaining insight into the fact that it is a game, which would then mean that they would no longer be able to play it. We can only play a game when we don’t know that it’s a game (we can only ‘know’ stuff to orientate ourselves around when we don’t see the paradox inherent in our way of making sense of the world). Not seeing the paradox means that we become the butt of a ‘cosmic joke’, we might say – a joke that we just can’t get. The joke in question isn’t the TBP as such, the joke is that we act as if something is real when it isn’t, the joke is that we live our whole lives exactly as if this paradigm were actually TRUE without acknowledging the device that we’re using, without admitting to ourselves that we’re doing anything.
We live our lives as if ‘all that there is’ is this ‘fatuous echo chamber’ – the fatuous echo chamber which supports and confirms us in all our ridiculous inane suppositions. We can believe in anything at all just so long as whatever it is makes sense within the terms of the inviolate framework, and at yet this diversity of possibilities is only virtual – the truth of the matter being that whatever we elect to believe in it’s still just ‘the same old framework’. It is therefore our ‘inability to see the redundancy’ that facilitates life in the Mind-Created Virtual Reality, which makes this ignorance / blindness very precious to us. Collectively speaking, we are very strict indeed when it comes to spending our lives ‘obeying stupid rules we ourselves made up’ (which is to say, ‘staying within boundaries that aren’t in any way real’) – we don’t permit any deviations from the template of how we are to think and behave. We are therefore obsessively ‘protecting our captor’; we are jealously protecting our arch abuser even as he makes rubbish of us on a daily basis. He makes rubbish of us every single time and yet we keep on coming back for more…
Image credit – Estudio Santa Rita/ BBC
