Any construct, any system, when it is used allowed to run freely on its own terms, will always do the very same thing – it will expand rapidly until it has taken up all the available space. It will blow up – like a balloon, it will inflate. It will inflate, and it will take over. Systems behave with aggression, they know nothing else but aggression. Everything that is made by logic is the same in this way, everything that is made of logic is fascistically aggressive – valuing only itself, single-mindedly exploiting the whole world for its own (absurdly) narrow benefit.
The expansionist / fascistic engine that is ‘the system’ doesn’t promote itself as single-mindedly as it does because it has so much content, or so much potential (which is the implicit claim) – it doesn’t have any content, it has precisely zero potential. Logic ‘agrees with itself’ and this is where its mandate for expansion, its mandate for aggression, comes from. Logic is a dead thing – it goes nowhere accept on its own unreal terms, it achieves nothing except in its own tautological reckoning. From its own perspective, its claim is absolute, unquestionable, beyond reproach; outside of its own perspective, logic is a virus, an interloper – the only thing it knows is meaningless multiplication, pointless proliferation. Like Alexander the Great, when it reaches the limit of its expansion it will lose the reason for existence (which is to conquer territory in a glorious way, which is to ‘expand forever’). ‘What is a soldier without a foe?’ asks Robert Wyatt.
How – we might ask – does the expansionist empire of logic manage to take up all this space if it’s got no content? How does it take over so dramatically if there isn’t really anything there in it? And yet – intuitively – we know this makes sense – we all know very well that empty barrels make the most noise, we all know very well that folk with nothing to say do the most talking, we all know perfectly well that the cheap generic copy has the advantage over ‘that which is unique’, over ‘the one off’ in that it is entirely replaceable, entirely interchangeable. The generic copy does not die, cannot die – it has a type of immortality in that it reboots itself endlessly. Remove one and there are ten thousand more to instantly take its place, at no cost whatsoever. Quantity effortlessly overwhelms quality; the crushing homogeneity of the group easily eliminates the influence of the individual. The individual isn’t just ‘diluted’ here, they are converted into nothing more than mere ‘error’.
The essential thing to understand about linear systems (which – as a rule – we don’t understand) is that what we read on the label is exactly what we get in it. To put this another way, the description of this system is in no way different to the system itself. The formula we follow to create the system is the same thing as that formula, which means that nothing is being created (which is to say, despite appearances to contrary, when we ‘roll out the continuum of logic’, nothing is really happening). Logic isn’t spontaneous (or ‘self-arising’) in nature but rather it is ‘specified in advance’, which means is that it is the plan or agenda which is important,. We have to say what it is and what it isn’t; we have to define or specify it and the very fact that we have to specify what it is we’re constructing means that they can’t be anything in it other than what we have said there should be; the description of what to be is constructed and the construction itself are one and the same thing (which – as we’ve just said – means that there is no actual content there).
We treat the construct as if it was something different from our formula for making it, from our description or specification for how it should be, but this is merely a convention. It’s a convention that there is content there, and it is a convention that we base our whole lives upon. This is a very curious thing therefore – what it means is that when we live in the Thought-Created World (which is to say, the ‘rational simulation’ or ‘conceptualized version’ of reality) then we are living in a world that is devoid of content. By being so specific – i.e., by insisting that everything has to be exhaustively defined before we can pay any heed to it – we will miss out on the whole show – the reason being that reality can’t be specified. If we concern ourselves entirely with specifics, as we do, then we will miss out on reality entirely; ‘truth is all there is’ (as the song says) and yet – despite this – we still contrive to lose sight of it on a full-time basis. Despite the fact that there is nothing else to relate to, we still contrive to have no conscious relationship with reality whatsoever. Instead, we’re being hypnotised by our own ideas on the subject. Instead, we’re engaged in worshipping a false God who demands our total obedience regardless of how nonsensical (or self-contradictory) our instructions might be, a phoney deity who effortlessly tricks us into betraying ourselves on a minute-by-minute basis.
To live in the type a world where ‘the label’ and ‘the content of the tin’ are one and the same is thus to live in a hollow world, a virtual world, a world without content. It doesn’t sound right to us to say this because we tend to assume that there must at the very least be the content that has been specified, the content that the description is telling us about. We assume that the label (or the instruction) has some sort of reality or validity in its own right when this isn’t the case – there’s no content in a description, no content in a formula or definition, no content in a set of instructions or rules. Logical structures (or statements) only have the existence they implicitly claim to have within the virtual world which is the linear extrapolation or elaboration of these very same structures, these very same statements. A logical statement only makes sense with its own terms, and its own terms are only meaningful if the statement in question is meaningful.
There is no basis to a loop of logic; there is obviously never going to be any basis for a loop of logic. We nevertheless imagine – as we go about our daily business – that there absolutely is a basis, that there absolutely is a direct and unproblematic correspondence between the concrete statements we make and the world that these statements purportedly relate to. We ascribe content to our terms, content to our ideas, content to the language we use in order to describe our situation to ourselves, and there isn’t any. This is the ‘big assumption’ we make, therefore – the assumption that our descriptions actually relate to something in the outside world. Our ideas about the world are a type of agreed-upon currency – they’re like ‘coins of the realm’ in that we run around conducting transactions, buying and selling, saving and speculating, and as we do so we very quickly fall into thinking that the currency we’re using has genuine value of its own (when of course it doesn’t). Repetition reifies the ‘short-hand’ that we are habitually using so that it no longer seems like short-hand but rather the very language of reality itself. Our short-hand gets taken as long-hand and this is how we collapse reality into a mere mental construct; this is how we create ‘the Dehydrated World’ – the world with no actual ‘content’ in it… We could of course equally well have adopted an entirely different convention and this would make no essential difference to anything (instead of metal coins or paper notes, we could use glass beads or pebbles or seashells, for example) and the system would work just as well.
It’s the same with all of our beliefs, no matter how precious and unique they might seem to us – if it isn’t one thing then it will be another and so the details consist of don’t matter in the least. We’re quite prepared to go to war over the question of ‘who’s belief gets to be accepted as true’ and yet one is as good as another. We want a concrete picture of the world, we want to unambiguous description, a definite story of ‘what’s going on’; once we’ve got it then everything will be OK, we say. Once everything has been nailed down then we can get on with the important business of living our lives, we say. That’s the theory, at any rate…
The truth is however that there can be no such thing as ‘living’ (or ‘life’) when we’re operating on the fictional basis – life isn’t a pre-scripted affair, life doesn’t obey logic. When we collapse reality then we can only have the fiction that we’re living and ‘the fiction that we’re living’ acts against us – it acts against us because ‘the lie’ blocks (or occludes) the real thing. Our lies are opaque, our lies throw the whole world into darkness – we can’t see beyond them and so we’re compelled to make do with them as if they were actually true. Everything about us then becomes a fiction, everything about us becomes a lie. The fiction (or the lie) has ‘gotten out of control’; the Mind-Created Virtual Reality has ‘gotten the better of us’ and as a result it has ‘murdered’ the actual (unmanufactured) reality. Rumi’s dragon has been woken up out of its sleep and has eaten up the entire world…
Image credit – syncopatedjustice.com
