Our loyalty – on the whole – is not to the truth (which is of course what we would all like to believe) but to maintaining the false narrative that we – as a collective, as a group – have tacitly agreed not to question. Because our loyalty is to an agreement that we are not ever allowed to mention (or in any way draw attention to or admit to having made in the first place) this loyalty also has to be ‘implicit rather than explicit’. We’re all governed by it but no one’s ever going to mention the fact, no one’s ever going to actually come right out and say it. To acknowledge our loyalty to the secret agenda would be to breach that loyalty – to do this would be to betray that loyalty and we would rather do anything than that. Our ‘unacknowledged loyalty to the lie’ is what keeps us prisoner, therefore; if we were to recognise this loyalty for what it is then we would straightaway be free from it, but the whole point is that we’re not going to. Playing the game means not admitting that we are, just as R.D. Laing says.
We’re ‘loyal to the lie’ but we have absolutely no awareness of the fact and because of the deeply unconscious nature of our allegiance to the official narrative if we were to go against it then we would experience a great sense of guilt. We would experience ourselves to be doing something wrong, even though the truth of the matter is that we aren’t, even though the truth of the matter is that the wrong in question is being done against us. This ‘introjection of external rules or conditions’ is of course a very commonly encountered phenomenon; being part of a social collusion is an intrinsically unhealthy type of situation – everyone hands over responsibility to the ‘collectively agreed-upon viewpoint’ and this means that no one is taking responsibility. Everyone is busy handing over responsibility to everyone else. A collective that is made up of millions upon millions of people not taking any responsibility for anything is hardly something that we can feel safe trusting in. The group – we might say – is nothing more than a manifestation of mass insanity. Society is nothing more than a manifestation of mass insanity – no one is taking responsibility for anything. We’re just going along with the narrative that everything is great, that everything is OK…
The much-venerated social group is a manifestation of mass insanity and yet at the same time it takes upon itself an authority that is frankly overpowering, an authority that – for the most part – we wouldn’t even dream of questioning. What we have here is the face of impeccable respectability, a face which is the epitome of good sense and moral responsibility, but what’s behind this face is what can only be described as an appalling lack of responsibility. The collective has no integrity whatsoever (only individuals can have actual integrity). As the collective, we are acting as if such-and-such a thing is true and there is a kind of absolute weight (or inertia) to this, but no matter how much weight we put into the acting as if ‘such-and-such were true’ the fact remains that it absolutely isn’t. Each and every member of the collusion wants very much for it to be true, wants very much for there to be something solid behind the polished facade (since that is where we get all our validation from) but ‘what we want’ has of course nothing to do with anything. ‘What we want’ is entirely irrelevant, entirely beside the point. In general, all that our wanting or craving does is to produce unceasing suffering. What we want we can never have (because it just isn’t true) but there is nevertheless a result of our craving for the unreal thing and that result is pain. The more effort we put into ‘acting as if something which isn’t true is true’ the more pain we are storing up for ourselves in the future; we are ‘plotting against ourselves,’ therefore…
All of this is just a long-winded way of saying that we’re what we’re engaged in here with all of this is simply denial – we’re in collective denial of the truth, the truth being that there is no right way to see things, that there is no right way to do things. We’re in denial of our own freedom, in other words; we’re in denial of the actual nature of things. Denial – we might say – has a very particular quality associated with it and that is the quality of coercion. In a system that is based on coercion (a system like the one we’ve just described) everything that happens in it happens as a result of force. Stuff happens here because it has been made to happen, no other reason. If stuff were to be allowed to happen naturally then what would happen would be that we would start to become healthily curious about our situation and – sooner or later – we will spot it for being fake, we will spot it for being a ‘put-up job’. We will see what every human being sees when they come back to themselves and become actually conscious, which is that our world the word that we believe in so trustingly is made up of lies. In the uncompromising words of Leo Tolstoy –
False. Everything by which you have lived and live now is all a deception, a lie, concealing both life and death from you.
‘Denial’ and ‘absence of freedom’ go together therefore – the only way we’re allowed to look at the world (or think about the world) is the way that everyone else does, which is the way that the code of conduct that has been voted into existence tells us we have to. The price of regaining our freedom is that we personally have to refrain from looking the other way and pretending that there’s nothing dodgy going on (in the way that everyone else does). We have to ‘question the rule’. From the collective point of view we are being very ‘irresponsible’ therefore; we’re being ‘irresponsible’ because we’re letting something happen that all right-thinking people know they shouldn’t let happen. We’re not avoiding what the code of conduct says we should avoid. Not only do we have to disregard society’s greatest (unspoken) taboo, we also have to confront our own greatest fear. The ‘Cave of Treasures‘ which Joseph Campbell talks about isn’t just barred once therefore, it’s barred twice – it is barred both by the tremendous overwhelming authority of society as a whole, and by our own personal terror (which we absolutely don’t want to look at). The fact that there are two such fearsome guardians blocking our access to the Cave should tip us off that there’s something valuable there, something that we’re not supposed to know about, but the habit of blindly obeying authority is too deeply entrenched in us for such suspicions to arise. We have been sold the idea that all this authority, all this brutal coerciveness, is there for our own good. Fear causes us to hand over all our responsibility to our captor, in other words.
Fear, when it rules over us, inverts our natural intelligence. Our healthy curiosity is thus turned on its head to become a love of obedience, a love of fitting in, a love of complying with the system (whatever that system might be). Our fearless autonomy becomes ‘loyalty to the authority structure that wants to control every aspect of our lives’. When we come across any sign of healthy curiosity (or fearless autonomy) in others we are immediately incensed, we are flooded with instant moral indignation and we want to see these wrong doers corrected, we want to see them punished so that they learn the error of their ways. Nothing gives us more satisfaction than to see wrong doers getting their just desserts. Across the board, we ‘persecute the deviant’ – we persecute the deviant for no other reason that they are deviants, for no other reason than the fact that they are not thinking and doing what everyone else is thinking and doing. The fact that we are loyal to the lie means that we have to do this – we serve the system that we have mandated to deny consciousness rather than ‘consciousness itself’, which is our own true nature. We are all firmly on the side of the Great Oppressor in this ongoing battle; we are backing ‘the Tyrant Holdfast’ (since this is where the power lies).
Our essential nature has been perverted, in other words. ‘Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.’ says Nietzsche, and the ‘best thing in us’ is that spark of individuality in us that does not serve the omnipresent System of Denial (which wants to turn us all into blank generic copies of each other). What is natural for us is to be curious about life and to have a healthy disregard for the conventions and devices of this world. What is ‘natural’ is for us to go beyond the limits that have been set for us (instead of being the prisoners of them). In Platonic terms, what we’re looking at here is ‘the Ideal’ versus ‘the Perverted Counterpart’ – ‘the Ideal’ is the true individual (in which, as Jung says, all value lies), whilst ‘the Perverted Counterpart’ is (as we have been saying) the love of rules and regulations, the love of ‘fitting in’, the love of punishing the deviant, and the ungodly fear of anything new, anything strange, anything that the dourly repressive ‘System of Denial’ doesn’t approve of…
Image credit – reddit.com
