The more we ‘scale up’ (in terms of our mode of socio-economic organization) the further we move in the direction of creating the Generic World and we are without any doubt at all absolutely committed to upscaling in this way. This – for us – is without any question ‘the way to go’. There is a deadly logic here, a logic that exerts a hypnotic effect on us which we can’t resist and so we just keep on getting bigger and bigger. Instead of staying local and staying small we go for globalization, with all of the ‘not-so-obvious’ dangers that this mechanical trend entails.
The logic of the system – the logic of all systems – is to keep expanding itself, to keep on extending and extending. The ultimate point of this expansion is to make everything be the system, although this tends to be something we don’t reflect on very much, if at all. We don’t see what this expansion really means, therefore. The logic of systems is to seek a solution to whatever the problem is and – ultimately – it turns out that it is reality itself which is the problem. Reality itself needs to be solved, and the way the system strives to do this is by replacing reality with itself. Natural (or ‘non-originated’) reality gets replaced by ‘the officially authorised version’, which has the ‘advantage’ of being authorized and the disadvantage of not being true, of being completely fake. It is natural enough that we wouldn’t want to frame things quite like this – it doesn’t have much in the way of appeal when spelt out as bluntly as this. If we saw things this way we would also have to see that the much-lauded system (the set-up we are putting all our resources into promoting) is actually a disease; we would have to see that what we’re talking about here is a terrible illness that we become blind when it affects us. We would have to see the process of globalization as an actual evil. Far from seeing the viral logic of the system as an illness we see it as being altogether a very good (if not indispensable) thing and we jump on board the bandwagon with full willingness and commitment, believing that it will take us to a good place. We may not know exactly what will be so good about it, but we know that it will be very good all the same. We’re all fired up about the journey we are taking…
Scaling up always involves the creation of the Generic World, as we started off by saying. The basic pattern remains the same, but we’re rolling it out over more and more territory. We’re obsessed with rolling it out. We’re rolling the pattern out over more and more territory, but as we do this we lose ground rather than gaining it – we’re losing ground because the result of our rolling out (our unlimited expansion) is that the actual territory, diverse as it is, is replaced by the dull uniformity of a pattern that will always stay the same no matter what. We seem to be getting somewhere whilst we are busy rolling out the pattern, the system, the generic carpet, but the truth is that we’re narrowing our horizons the whole time. The truth is that we are busy ‘getting trapped in our own device’.
There is an economy of scale that comes into play when we roll out the GW (which is as we have just said the world that is created by the endless multiplication of the same basic formula) but whatever gains we might make here with regard to the efficiency of communication and administration is more than paid for in terms of what we might call ‘the psychological downside’. The psychological downside has to do with the adverse effects of the generic environment (or of the system) on the individual. This is not a hard problem to spot – the GW is implacably inimical to our true individuality, and yet of course our ultimate nature is the individuality that the GW is fundamentally opposed to and so what more of a downside could there be than this?
The GW is implacably inimical or hostile to the individual simply because it cannot acknowledge the value that individuality carries. The GW can’t acknowledge individuality (or uniqueness) in any way – it only become aware of it in a very limited fashion, it can register individuality only in as much as it recognises it as an error, something that has no justification, something that shouldn’t be there. This is the attitude of the regular and regulated system to the ‘unique or individual element’ and this ought not to come as any great surprise to us – the essential nature of the generic is that it is composed of the same basic pattern or formula repeated over and over again. All the system can ever acknowledge is itself therefore – anything else immediately stands out as being not itself, as being other, as being a flaw or defect in the taken-for-granted pattern. The system tacitly assumes itself to be ‘the only reality’ and so anything that isn’t itself is automatically seen as an error or mistake, as we have already said.
When we are subscribing to the GW then we have to go ‘along with the story’ therefore, even though the story is only a story, even though the story isn’t real. The system is created by ‘enforcing regularity’, it is created via the repetition of an abstract formula and nothing that isn’t a repetition of this formula is even allowed. This – as we have just said – gives it away a fail-safe way of determining ‘what is itself’ and ‘what is not itself’. The system is its own standard, and other words, which is a very handy little trick (since in reality there are no standards). What we’re talking about here is ‘handy’ because it is so very easily carried out, and it is a ‘trick’ because there is no actual basis for this other than the basis which logic has itself created. To make the repetition itself be ‘proof of legitimacy’ is in itself not a legitimate thing to do. As soon as the pattern gets copied it turns into a template therefore and a template is ‘a template’ simply because it is never questioned once it is in place.
The ‘logic’ (however tautological it might be) that the GW operates on is ‘unquestionable within the terms of the system’ and the system doesn’t allow or doesn’t accept that there is anything else but itself. There’s no arguing with the system therefore and so we don’t argue – we go along with it instead. And yet the whole thing is based on nothing, nothing at all – it’s all just hot air. We want the system because it gives us something to work with, something to get our claws into, and so we aren’t going to go poking into the trick that lies behind it. It might be said that we are constitutionally averse to go poking around. While look a gift horse in the mouth, after all? Why tinker with something that appears to be working perfectly well, and which is – furthermore – performing an extremely important function? The GW is performing the extremely important function of ‘being our reality surrogate’; it is performing the extremely important function of ‘being the whole world for us’, however appallingly limited and repetitive that ‘world’ might be.
But although logic does work very well at providing us with a structure, and although the system does to a very good job in ‘being the system’, this doesn’t mean that the Generic World isn’t implacably opposed to individuality – just because the system is extremely efficient (within its own terms of reference, of course) does not automatically mean that this is going to be good news for us! Giving more and more power to an adversarial force isn’t exactly going to pan out for us, no matter how much we might be in love with the (tautological) logic that informs it. All we’re doing here is forming bonds of loyalty to our oppressor, which is of course what naturally happens under these circumstances. We have been provided with a hiding place and so we are loyal to the system that is doing this for us, even though that system is acting against us every step of the way.
When we are engaged in this business of ‘expanding’ or ‘scaling up’ then we are operating on the logic of the system, and so all seems well to us. We seem to be headed in a good direction. The downside of this however is that we’re running on the basis of a bunch of assumptions that we are afraid to question; we’re afraid to question them because that’s all we’ve got, because we (implicitly) ‘don’t believe that there is anything else’. We are building castles on clouds – which is of course what always happens when we are too afraid to test our basis. When we are driven by the secret fear of finding out that we don’t have a legitimate basis then obviously there is going to be no ‘checking up’ going on and this inevitably means that we are building our castle (however splendid it might seem to be) on a big white fluffy cloud.
The castle in question is the Generic World and for this reason it is possible to say that our apparently ‘positive’ motivation to keep on extending the system (or to keep on chasing our goals, which is another way of saying the same thing) is actually the motivation of denial, which is the motivation of fear, and if this is our secret motivation in creating the Generic World then this can hardly be counted as ‘an auspicious beginning’. What good can ever come from being commendably busy the whole time, but at the same time being too afraid to see what we are actually doing with all our ‘busy-ness’?
Image – wallpaperbat.com
