The one thing technology can never help us with is in being original – technology is all about ‘efficient duplication’, it’s all about the ‘realisation’ (or ‘reification’) of generic ideas, and this is another type of thing entirely.
When we become dependent upon technology (as we absolutely have done) then we lose our capacity to be original. When everything becomes about ‘efficient duplication’ then originality no longer matters. It’s not about being original anymore, it’s about how efficiently (or effectively) we copy whatever it was that we were given to copy by the External Authority.
In the Machine World originality counts for nothing, they’re supposed to be re projecting. What matters in the Machine World is how accurately we can reproduce whatever it is that we’re supposed to be reproducing. What counts is how diligently we’re able to follow the rules. What counts in the machine World is obedience, in other words, and ‘obedience’ is not originality. Originality is – on the contrary – the perfect antithesis of obedience…
It’s not that originality needs ‘approval’ or ‘validation’ or anything like that – bringing some supposed authority negates originality rather than supporting it. Validation and approval and all that sort of thing belong to the Machine World, and they have no place outside of it. Approval versus disapproval, agreement versus disagreement, reward versus punishment, etc, constitute ‘the mechanism of authority’ (or ‘the mechanism of control’) and there is no valuing of originality here.
When control (rather than spontaneity) is out thing then it’s only the ‘short-sighted view’ that we care about; the achieving of goals has become everything to us and we’re so busy trying to attain them that we have no awareness (or interest) in the Bigger Picture. The ‘Bigger Picture’ doesn’t exist when we’re operating in Machine Mode – the technical details of fulfilling whatever task it is that we have been given to fulfill takes up every last bit of our attention. Any free (or uncommitted’) awareness that we might have is soaked up just as ink is soaked up by blotting paper. It disappears without leaving a trace!
Originality isn’t just something that’s ‘unimportant’ to us (or ‘irrelevant’ to us) when we’re in Machine Mode – it’s a deadly enemy, it’s something to be stamped out wherever we come across it. It’s the ‘bug in the system’ that needs to be ironed out so that everything can work as it should do. Originality is what stands between us and efficiency and – as we keep on saying – efficiency is everything when we’re in Machine Mode. Nothing else matters but achieving the goal. Originality isn’t seen as originality – actually, it’s seen as a manifestation of what we call ‘chaos’, it’s seen as ‘random error’.
When all error has been illuminated then 100% efficiency will be achieved and 100% efficiency is god – 100% efficiency is what we all want. Anything (or anyone) who gets in the way of that deserves everything they get – they’re wrong and they need to be corrected. ‘Wrong is wrong’ and that’s all there is to know about it. To wilfully not fit in with what everyone else is busy fitting into is unthinkable, it’s utterly shocking, and it deserves to be met with a maximum prejudice, maximum aggression…
100% efficiency in obtaining our goals (or in ‘reproducing whatever it is that we are supposed to be reproducing, which comes to the same thing) isn’t really as glorious and splendid as we like to imagine, however. Duplication is only ever as good as what is being duplicated after all, and what it is that is being duplicated isn’t something that we’ve been paying very much attention to. Actually, this isn’t something that we’ve been paying any attention to at all! As we’ve just pointed out, when we are in Mechanical Mode then having the ‘overview’ on why we’re doing what we’re doing isn’t really our department – we leave that to ‘the experts’. When we’re focusing on the technical side of things (i.e., when we’re copying whatever it is that we’re supposed to be copying, and making sure that we’re not making any mistakes) then we are simply not able to see the Big Picture and seeing the Big Picture means asking why the hell we’re doing whatever we’re doing in the first place.
‘Playing the game’ and ‘being aware of the Big Picture’ are two things that can’t happen at the same time – it’s either got to be one or the other. To play the game is to take it for granted that what we’re trying to achieve in it is important, that it actually means something; playing a game isn’t a ‘philosophical’ type of thing, in other words. Accurately and reliably duplicating the pattern that we were given to start off with simply isn’t a philosophical kind of thing; making an assumption and then acting out that assumption without realising that it’s only an assumption isn’t a philosophical kind of thing, On the contrary, it’s what we might call a mechanical kind of thing…
When we’re in Machine Mode then we won’t have anything to do with anything that hasn’t been officially validated. We won’t have anything to do with something that has no precedence behind it and that’s another way of saying that we won’t have anything to do with anything original. Machines aren’t impressed by originality! They don’t take to originality at all – it’s just not their thing. This puts us in a distinctly awkward position however – it puts us in an awkward position because we’re now totally dependent upon some External Authority to tell us ‘what to do’ (or to ‘tell us what’s important and what’s not’) We dependent upon the EA to tell us what’s important because we have no way of discerning this for ourselves. This is what the state of heteronomy is all about.
Without the capacity to be philosophical (which essentially means ‘having an independent viewpoint’, or being able to ‘think for ourselves’, as it is said, we are left bereft of all dignity. No matter how skilled or dedicated we might be, if we can’t ‘think for ourselves’ (so to speak) then we are simply tools to be picked up and used by anyone who happens to come along. We’re anybody’s – we’ve put ourselves at the mercy of whatever dumb mechanical forces might be out there. We will strive heroically to succeed at whatever pointless task it is that we have been given. ‘Tell me what to do, master,’ we will say to whatever authority structure happens to be dominant at the time.
Technology facilitates us in completing whatever task we are engaged in in a more effective manner and we’re all in favour of this, but what it doesn’t facilitate us in is ‘being able to tell whether the task that we have dedicated ourselves to is actually worth it or not’. Even the most advanced AI assistant in the world can’t help us on this one – there’s no such thing as ‘a technology they can tell us how to use technology wisely’. For that, an actual genuine independently minded human being is needed and that just happens to be the one thing that we are in very short supply of. We have long since ceased to value wisdom in our maniacal adulation of efficiency and effectiveness.
Our technology rules us rather than us ruling it, in other words. The tail is wagging the dog. We always tend to feel superior to those folk who lived in previous ages since we now have all this amazing technological know-how, all this astonishing technology; technology is only as good as the uses we are putting it to however – the value of the technology depends upon the wisdom of the people who are ‘overseeing’ it, so to speak, but there are no wise people overseeing the use of technology, no matter what we might like to think. Our consciousness has been conditioned to work in a machine-like way from a very early age, and since we are already thinking in a mechanical (which is to say, goal-orientated) way there can be no question of us exercising much in the way of wisdom. By adapting to the Machine World, we ourselves become machines. As James Carse says –
Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when we operate them; We make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them.
Machinery does not steal our spontaneity from us; We set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality. There is no style in operating a machine. The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness into its operation.
When we say that the one thing technology can never help us with is in ‘being original’ (or in ‘being who we actually are’) this is an absurd understatement, however. It’s not that technology (and the machine-type thinking that goes with it) can’t facilitate us in ‘being creative’, or ‘being original’, or ‘getting in touch with who we really are’ (which it clearly can’t) but that it prevents us very effectively indeed from being creative or original, that it puts an impenetrable barrier in place to stop us from being who we are. All of this becomes a pragmatic impossibility for us. This is what Alan Watts calls ‘The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’…
It’s not – as Carse says – that machines force us to become like them – that’s not how mechanical devices work. Mechanical devices simply ‘do what they do’ – that being their inescapable nature; the point is that we lose touch with our true spontaneous nature when we buy into the mechanical way of looking at the world (because that’s where we perceive our advantage to lie). The mechanical paradigm is the only paradigm on offer so – of course – this is where we perceive our advantage to lie. There doesn’t seem to be any alternative – everyone else is playing this game so – naturally enough – we’re super-keen to do so as well. We’ll be ‘left out’ otherwise, and who wants that? Conformity is rewarded whilst deviance is harshly punished, so what else are we going to do? This is a ‘no-brainer’ – we jump onto the bus that everyone else has jumped onto, as seems prudent.
Out of our understandable keenness to avail of the benefits that come with adaptation to the existing system comes our present ‘malaise’, however (which is in itself something of an understatement). A better way of expressing it would be to say that we’re ‘up against a brick wall’ in the most dreadful dead end there ever was, and that we’re in full-blown denial about it. That our current way of life is one in which our creativity / originality / authenticity / spontaneity has been very effectively blocked can hardly be denied. On some level we know this very well – we just don’t want to know. In accordance with the weaker side of human nature, we have tacitly agreed amongst ourselves that ‘everything is fine’ and that we’re ‘moving majestically in the right direction’ and such an agreement – which we absolutely won’t admit to – can of course only have one result, and it’s not the one we think it will be. When we submit to the mechanism of authority (when we submit to the power of the Group Lie) then we ‘sacrifice ourselves on the altar of denial’, and of all the ways to go this is – without any doubt – the one with the least dignity.
Image credit – Illustration: Jovana Mugoša, taken from bloomberg.com
