Society is a ‘crazy-making’ machine. A set of values are solemnly held up as being true when they absolutely aren’t. If we dare to say anything however then this is immediately bounced back on us (so as to say, ‘this is you being difficult’, or ‘the fault is actually in you not anywhere else’. The repressive social mechanism here is that we get blanked, is that we get looked at in a particular way, is that we get excluded from the discourse, etc, every time we say something out of line. We thus learn to not to do it – we learn that we shouldn’t be thinking at things this way. Like good girls and boys, we learn to ‘internalise the blame’.
This is the reason that no one ever comes out and says that society is a ‘crazy-making machine’. No one will ever say it – even social psychologists don’t say it, and if they won’t who will? Sociologists, along with philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Michel Foucault say it, but no one pays any heed to them. We have no interest in discovering where so much of our mental ill health and general misery comes from – we’d rather make money (or a career) out of peddling false cures (since this is by far the more convenient thing to do). The whole point is that no one admits to society being a source of mental ill health – if this particular truth were to be let out of the bag (and went on to became general knowledge) then there would be nothing to make people feel – wrongly – that there’s something wrong with them, that they are ‘crazy’. We’d see instead that it is society that is crazy, that is dysfunctional, and this would instantly put a stop to the whole business. That would spell the end of the coercive dysfunctional self-harming collusion which we point blank refuse to critically examine. We give society its power by not questioning it.
Dishonesty is the name of the game when it comes to ‘crazy making’ – the dishonesty is what jinxes us, the dishonesty what does our head in. This is what does the damage. There’s more to it than this, however – where we come across dishonesty over time and this isn’t all the time and this isn’t going to jinx us, this isn’t going to do I had said, but when the lie comes from the source that we can’t question, a source that we aren’t allowed to question, then this is when we end up blaming ourselves, this is when we end up ‘internalising the fault’. We recriminate viciously against ourselves, thereby making it all-but-impossible for us to see what is really going on. This is – we might say – the archetypal example of ‘divide and conquer’. In effect, therefore, the system is blaming us for its own shortcomings, thereby exonerating itself at our expense (at the expense of the actual people who go to make the system up). Whilst it’s true that the system can’t really blame anyone (since it’s not a real thing, since it’s only an empty abstraction) but – rather – the way that the blaming mechanism works is that we internalise the system so that all we can ever do is ‘act that system out’. We act it out in a perfectly mechanical fashion, and all the while we imagine (conveniently) that we are leading our own autonomous lives. As far as we’re concerned there’s ‘no problem’, therefore. Everything’s just fine and dandy, we say.
At this point we inevitably become victims of what we might call ‘systemic abuse’ – the system exploits and abuses us because that is all it can do. It’s a mechanism (which is to say, it follows mechanical laws) and that’s all there is to it. That’s the beginning and the end of it and anything else is merely our imagination. When we unreflectively identify with thought, identify with the system, identify with the rule, then we do the systems work for it (even though the system or rule doesn’t exist, even though it’s only an empty abstraction). This is precisely our situation, and – as we’ve said – no one ever draws attention to it. Not in a million years will we draw attention to the true nature of our situation. Instead, we chase red herrings to our heart’s content. We chase red herrings all day long, we chase them until the day finally comes when we’re unable to chase them anymore…
When we unconsciously enact the system (when we allow it to take us over (or possess us, as we might also say) then we inevitably ‘turn on ourselves’; aggression is the name of the game and we’re playing the game even though we don’t know it, even though we don’t know that there is such a thing as ‘the game. The system works purely on exploitation, no matter how we might try to disguise this singularly unpleasant fact with fine sounding phrases. It ‘is what it is’ and it always will be, no matter how we might like to dress it up with ethics, morality religion, and talk of the Creator God (who created human beings in order that they might scurry to do His will). God in this case exist purely to validate our abuse, to validate our ruthless (and ultimately self-destructive) exploitation of the world around us.
All of this non-stop aggression achieves nothing however – it merely serves to turn the wheel faster. ‘Ramping up the exploitation’ merely accelerates and intensifies the general level of suffering. The system is already ‘eating itself’ and so putting our foot down hard on the accelerator pedal only means is that it is going to eat itself faster! The idea that aggression or impatience can ever achieve anything is utterly ludicrous; cultivating a vice until it reaches the point where it dominates the whole of our life is hardly going to help us – the vice will benefit for sure, but not us. To follow through with an addiction that is already in the process of devouring us alive is hardly going to bring health and well-being in its wake and yet we put every last bit of our energy into it just as if it is going to benefit us. This is the perversity inherent in the Unconscious Life (which is the only life we know or believe in).
What we’re looking at here is a clear case of the ‘prey identifying with the predator that is eating it’ (or ‘the victim identifying with the parasite that is parasitizing it’) – we identify with the addiction and so it very much feels that we are benefiting ourselves. When we realize – as we ultimately must realize – that we’re actually the prey and not the predator then of course it’s too late for us. The disguise isn’t needed any more – the predator doesn’t care if we know what’s happening once the job is done since there is nothing we can do about it then. There’s no need to be nice to the mark once you’ve got what you want out of him, after all…
In what we might call the Inverted World ‘ignorance is strength’, as George Orwell has noted. If we are ignorant of the true (malign) nature of what we are signing up for (or ‘pledging our allegiance to) then we can go ahead and sign up with a clear conscience. We can believe we’re doing the right thing. When we’re ignorant of the true nature of what we’re doing (or of what we’re trying to accomplish) then there’s nothing to stop us doing it, nothing to stop us trying to accomplish it. It’s ‘full steam ahead’. What we think we’re doing (or accomplishing) isn’t at all what’s really happening and if we saw this – if we saw the internal contradiction – then that would completely jinx both our worldview and our understanding of ourselves. Seeing the utter impossibility of what we have put all our money on trying to achieve would constitute what we might call ‘the Great Catastrophe’ – the great catastrophe that we are forever trying to avoid. The very last thing we want to see is that the system isn’t our good friend and protector (as it claims to be), and that it is in fact our abuser.
Image credit – DavidL, streetartutopia.com
