To not extend the system, to not project or promote the system, is very difficult. It’s very difficult because there’s no precedence for it – originality is required. Precedence means that we’ve got tracks to run on, it means that no work is required. Zero work is required – the process ‘does us’ rather than ‘us doing it’ (which isn’t of course the way we experience it to be). We’re ‘piggybacking a mechanical process’ and the result of this is that we think ‘we’re doing it’ when the unpalatable truth is that ‘it is doing us’. The mechanical process (aka ‘the System’, aka ‘the Machine’) is operating us and not vice versa.
The extension (or proliferation) of the system is a virtual event – it’s only an event because we say it is, in other words. There’s no cost to the proliferation of the system, no cost to the ‘rolling out of the logical continuum’, and this is why we say that the process is ‘easy rather than hard’. It’s an accomplishment ‘only in our imaginations’. It’s a hollow accomplishment’ – it’s so easy that it isn’t actually real. It’s a cheat, in other words – it’s a hack. Virtual events are ‘ten a penny’ – they’re ten a penny because they aren’t really events at all, because we only imagine that they are…
Do a thing once and that is an actual event. It’s an act of pure, undeniable originality. There is boldness, or courage, here because we’re not riding on anyone else’s coattails. To do only what has already been done – on the other hand – is a cop out, an act of cowardly avoidance! The new is always a challenge and we’re avoiding that challenge by sticking to the old, by sticking to ‘the things that have already been done’. It costs us nothing to copy what has already been done; it involves no courage, no risk at all and because it involves no risk there’s nothing real in what we are doing. Reality equals ‘risk’.
With regard to this business of ‘rolling out the logical continuum’ (which is to say, ‘extending the system outwards into non-formatted space’) we can observe that this is ‘a risk-free operation’. Risk-avoidance is what logic is all about – only what is absolutely safe, absolutely predictable, is allowed. The thing about this however – as we have already noted – is that if we take a step (or make a move) that is 100% safe, 100% predictable (which is to say if we copy what has been done before) then this isn’t actually a step (or a move) at all. Informationally speaking, to repeat an action is not itself an action – ‘to cross twice is not to cross’. In our ordinary way of seeing things, repeating an action is a legitimate operation: making two cups of tea is different from only making the one, clapping twice can have a totally different significance to what clapping once does. When we look at things in terms of what’s happening information-wise however then copying or repeating absolutely isn’t a legitimate operation – no change is taking place in this scenario (any more than going around a racetrack twice is going to get us somewhere different from going around it once. No matter how many times we travel around in a circle we’re still not going to end up somewhere different; repetition doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference because no new information is coming into the picture.
Obviously the operation whereby we repeat an action (or duplicate an event) doesn’t involve any new information; The whole point of a ‘copying-type action’ is that it doesn’t involve any new information – if it did then that would mean that there’s something gone seriously wrong with our copying! Information equals ‘unexpected content’ and if there is unexpected content then this clearly means that the copying in question isn’t working out very well. Unpredictability (or ‘newness’) in the context of a copying-type operation being carried out simply means error and that is exactly what we’re trying to avoid when we’re in the business of copying or reproducing something. What we’re aiming at here is maximum predictability (or zero risk) – zero risk is where we hit the nail perfectly on the head and reproduce whatever it is we’re reproducing with perfect accuracy. This is ‘success’, this is what we get prizes for, this is what we get a pat on the back for, and yet – curiously – what we’re getting rewarded for is doing nothing (since when we copy an event that copying is itself not an event). When we copy what has happened before with perfect fidelity then we’re doing nothing whilst at the same time believing that we’re doing something (and not just that we’re doing something but that we’re doing the ‘right’ thing – the very best thing that is possible for us to do).
In the back-to-front world which is the Continuum of Logic we are rewarded for taking no risks, we are rewarded for being cowardly. Being fundamentally averse to coming across anything new (anything that doesn’t faithfully mimic what has come before) is redefined here as an actual virtue even though – from a psychological perspective – being averse to risk (i.e., being ‘neophobic’) is a weakness not a strength. We’ve turned everything around in our heads so that ‘indefinitely reiterating the past’ seems like the sensible thing to do, the responsible thing to do, etc. Taking risks in the logical continuum is actually illegal – it’s a wrong thing to do and we strive to avoid this as hard as we can. The whole point is we simply shouldn’t make any risky moves. This is all back-to-front however – if we don’t take any risk then we’re not going to get anywhere, ever. Zero risk means ‘going around in futile little circles’ and yet what we’re saying (or assuming) is the exact opposite of this. We’re saying that refusing all risk is precisely how we do get somewhere; we’re saying that refusing risk is the key to success.
The Continuum of Logic – by its own account – is the only thing that’s right – all else is error, all else is chaos. The Continuum of Logic – according to itself – is the ‘gold standard’, is the standard or measure of all that is real, and yet at the same time it is purely an abstraction, which means of course that there is exactly zero chance of it ever intersecting with the Non-abstract Realm, the realm that is independently real (rather than being a production of logic). The COT is an abstraction because of the way it is made – it’s made by picking a position, picking what passes for ‘an axiomatic statement’, and then using this position or statement as a criterion to determine what is valid and what is not valid, what is to be taken seriously and what is to be unthinkingly discounted us as being of no interest or importance. Once we have become adapted to this abstract (or ‘nominal’) world – the world that has been made by thought – we can’t for the life of us see anything wrong about it; we can’t see through the MCVR, but despite our conviction that this is ‘the right and proper way for things to be’, or ‘the only wait for things to be’, the essential mechanism by which this realm is created and maintained is itself entirely arbitrary. This is of course perfectly paradoxical because the raison d’etre for the world that is made from logic is that all randomness has to be unquestioningly eliminated. Randomness equals ‘accidental stuff’ and accidental stuff has to be gotten rid of – permanently, if possible. All accidents are to be corrected for – this is – as we keep saying – how the COT is created and maintained and yet the point we’re making here is that the measuring stick which we use to determine whether something is true or false is itself randomly obtained. The principle upon which the Logical Continuum is founded is the Principle of Exclusion – what disagrees with our criterion is automatically excluded as being random, as being chaotic, as being unwanted, and yet that same criterion, that same rule, is itself a product of chaos.
In order to get this Cosmic Joke, in order to appreciate this Great Irony, we would have to be able to see through the abstract (or nominal) world that thought has created for us, but we’re simply not able to do this. We’re incapable of doing that and the result of our shortsightedness in this regard is that we take it all very seriously. We couldn’t take it all more seriously – we have no sense of humour about our predicament whatsoever. We can’t see through the artificial / abstract world that thought has created for us because every time reality comes along, we unthinkingly write it off as error! As a result of ‘seeing everything upside-down’ we are trapped in a false world, a world that isn’t really there. In this upside-down virtual world everything is about extending the system, expanding the system, perpetuating the system, and so on. There is in other words the constant pressure to ‘obey the mechanical rule’. We can also talk about this in terms of ‘playing a game’ and say that ‘the pressure to extend or roll-out the system’ corresponds to the drive to win and this exemplifies the invisible irony that we’re talking about perfectly. The irony is that we perceive it to be the case that the mechanical pressure we’re under to endlessly propagate and promote the system is not extrinsic but intrinsic – we perceive the sense of urgency to be our own. What’s really happened is that we’ve been turned into mechanical puppets by the system – we’re doing what we’ve been told to do, thinking what we’ve been told to think, acting, perceiving what we’ve been compelled to perceive and yet at the same time we’re convinced that we’re in charge, we’re convinced that we’re running the show. The show is running us however, and the show – as we have been saying – is entirely hollow. It’s an empty sham…
Image credit – newyorker.com, The Truman Show Delusion
