The Compulsion To Adapt

The whole point about the Designed World (which we can also call the Machine World, or Society, or the Simulation) is that just as soon as we adapt to it – so that it becomes real to us – we immediately become profoundly unconscious, profoundly narcotized, profoundly asleep. These two apparently different things are really the same thing – adaptation to the Designed World means losing consciousness. This is ‘relevant’ for us to understand (we might say!) because the greatest force acting upon us in our lives – without any doubt – is the compulsion to adapt.

 

Now it goes without saying – therefore – that we all are adapted to the Designed World. That can hardly be questioned. This is our ‘common bond’ – the fact that we are all adapted to the Designed World. If we weren’t then we would immediately become aware of the most tremendous – indeed well-nigh insurmountable – gulf between us and everyone we meet. The ‘gulf’ that we are talking about here can be explained by saying that we no longer share a common world – the gulf equals our inability to speak of the world that we see all around us, and how radically it differs from the Designed World, which is the only world we have a ready-made language for, a learned set of behavioural adaptations to. The gulf arises as a result of the reality we see and feel but cannot speak of to anyone else.

 

The gulf in question consists of the impossibility of talking about the unsimulated world in a way that anyone can even remotely relate to. We keep on coming back to the same point – when we are adapted to the Designed World we simply can’t understand that there isn’t anything which isn’t the Designed World. Some kind of a trick has been played upon us – something very, very big has been cut out of the picture, as if by someone who is ‘editing reality’ before it gets to us, and then all traces of this editing operation have been erased. As a result we become fundamentally incapable of seeing that a huge part of reality is missing, is lost. And even if someone did see it, this loss has now become an impossible thing to ever mention, an impossible thing to communicate about.

 

This is exactly our situation when we have become adapted to the Designed World – a tremendous hoax has been perpetrated upon us that, because it is so tremendous, no one is ever going to suspect. If you were to talk about it you would straightaway be written off as insane. If you insisted enough, and didn’t have the good sense to keep your insights to yourself, you might even end up being treated for psychosis – your ‘psychosis’ would be that you can see that the reality everyone else believes in is false. When we talk about the mismatch between reality and what reality is represented as being according to society, according to the Designed World within which we live, then we are guaranteed to get precisely nowhere. This is really the same thing as the Big Lie propaganda technique which Adolf Hitler talked about in Mein Kampf:

 

…All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

 

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

 

The ‘colossal untruth’ that we are talking about is the implicit claim that the reality which the social system to which we are adapted takes for granted is the true and only one. There never was a greater lie than the lie which society (implicitly) tells us – even the ‘father of modern propaganda’ Joseph Goebbels would not have been able to come up with a lie as big this! So – just to reiterate – the thing about the big lie principle is that we are flatly incapable of spotting the lie because it is too big. We ourselves are not audacious enough to tell such a tremendously huge lie and so we just won’t be able to bring ourselves to suspect that someone else – someone in a position of great authority – has done so. Our very sanity would be at stake if we allowed ourselves to see this, or so it seems. We have after all adapted to the reality that has been presented to us; we have defined ourselves in terms of this reality and so we are now dependent upon it being true. If it goes down the drain then so do we (or at least our idea of ourselves does, which comes to pretty much the same thing as far as we are concerned). We have got ‘caught up in the lies‘.

 

It is because we have adapted to the Designed World that we are dependent upon it – it has become everything to us and so life without it is quite unthinkable. We have become flatly incapable of questioning the world that we have adapted to; it is as if there is an actual physical mechanism preventing us from doing so. We have no capacity – when utilizing the mind that the Designed World has provided us with, and which is an  extension of that same world – to ask ‘big questions’ – we just can’t do it. We can ask little questions, we can address ourselves to the technicalities of the situation, but we cannot question the artificial world to which we have become adapted…

 

This is remarkable enough in itself to consider but what makes the whole thing even more remarkable is that this artificial reality which is now ‘everything’ to us and which we are on this account fundamentally committed to protecting has the function of denying us completely. Our very being is denied by this relationship that we have to the DW. This is after all what the DW does to us – by believing in it we automatically lose all connection to our true selves. By believing in it we lose ourselves, therefore. When the DW becomes real to us – as it does as a result of us taking it seriously – we become unreal to ourselves. It could therefore be said that this relationship that we have with the artificial world is the ultimate in disempowering relationships. It’s not just a disempowering relationship – it’s an abusive one. It’s an abusive relationship that we’re trapped in but we neither know that it’s abusive nor that we’re trapped in it. To us it’s just normal; to us it’s the only way things could be…

 

The relationship we have going with the Designed World isn’t good for us. If we were to reflect on the matter a little that would start to become abundantly clear. Isn’t this what we’re always doing – constructing environments for ourselves that deny us? Isn’t that what our current environment is doing, under the guise of making things easier or more convenient for us? We have worked hard to create this artificial world and, having created it, we are now obliged to maintain it. This doesn’t sound too bad but that’s because we don’t see the price that we pay; we don’t see what maintaining the Designed World costs us. What it costs us is ourselves, as we have already said. Adapting to the mechanical environment means that we are turning our backs on who we truly are and because we have turned our backs on who we truly are we put all our efforts into cultivating and developing the conditioned identity which is ‘what we have to be in order to fit into the DW‘, or ‘what we are required to be by society’, and that isn’t us at all. That’s just an extension of the logical system that has absorbed us, Borg-fashion. The mechanical environment that we have created denies us; it denies us ourselves, as if that were something that somehow doesn’t matter in the bigger scheme of things…

 

The Designed World – which is the same thing as society – always denies us. It can’t be real if we are, as we have already said! This is a very strict trade-off – there’s no leeway here at all. There is no way that we can both have our cake and eat it (although eating this cake always involves being eaten ourselves). Either we have the cake and the cake eats us or we simply do without it, and go on a cake-free diet. If the DW is real to us then we cannot know ourselves, we can’t only know the cheap two-dimensional version of ‘who we are’ that the simulation provides for us. It’s not entirely that the environment that we have created is plotting against us to keep the truth from us, to keep us ignorant and powerless and subservient – although on one level this is of course exactly what is happening – but rather that us being ignorant and powerless and subservient to an all-determining system is an absolute prerequisite if we want to avail of that highly-desired feeling of ‘ontological security’ that the Designed Environment can provide us with. It’s a price which  – on some level  – we’re willing to pay, in other words…

 

We get what we want but that doesn’t mean that we don’t also suffer from getting it. The world that we have ploughed all our energy into maintaining is a world that is inimical to actual human beings. We can see this very clearly every time we take a look at an institution (particularly in the case of what Erving Goffman calls ‘total institutions’). Institutions exist on the basis that that they are for our own good, in some way or other, and that all we need to do is to obey the rules and procedures like good girls and boys so that the system is not impeded from carrying out its brief. The truth of the matter is that the institution – any institution – couldn’t give a damn about actual human beings but only their own role, which is validated by the fact that it is supposed to be for our own good. Institutions actually can’t care about actual human beings because they are machines and machines can’t care about people; machines exist for the sole purpose of following the rules upon which they are predicated – ‘following the rules’ is all any machine will ever care about. The institution (or organization) makes out that the two things are the same – i.e. that ‘following the rules’ is the same thing as ‘helping people’ and so if you don’t obey the rules and procedures then this is the very same as ‘sabotaging the cause’, which everything can plainly see to be completely indefensible, completely reprehensible. The system’s moral power over us means that we don’t have the right to question it, therefore.

 

The central thesis that institution is a benign entity which is working towards a better world for all of us (in some fashion or other) and that ‘following its rules and procedures to the letter’ is the way to achieve this wonderful outcome makes it impossible for us to put up any argument against it – we are crushed immediately by the sheer solid weight of the social machine, which on an absolutely fundamental level does not permit independent thought. What we can’t see (or can’t talk about if we do see) is that slavishly following rules and procedures, in an ultimately disempowered fashion, never leads to the good of anyone! Obedience is the worst of all human vices, as Ouspensky says. Following rules is good for machines (it allows machines to be machines, so obviously it’s good), but it’s not good for human beings. Following rules does not lead to mental health because mental health means autonomy, which means independence from rules. Obeying rules because we have been coerced into doing so, because we have been given no choice in the matter (which is what society is all about) isn’t good for human beings because it turns us into machines, and to be turned into a machine is to lose oneself, and become what one is not…

 

The Designed Environment is a machine – it cannot be anything other than a machine because it is based on rules (or ‘generalities’). Only what is permitted can be there – only the generic can be there. For consciousness, this is the most inimical situation there ever could be. There is no such thing as ‘generic consciousness’ (there can’t be, any more than there is such a thing as ‘the generic individual’) and so what this means is that is no consciousness in the DE. There is no individuality in the DE – only the generic is allowed, only the generic is acknowledged. Rules can’t recognize anything else, by their very nature. This situation – the situation that is created for us by the Designed Environment – denies us completely whilst claiming to be for our own good. The DE is the most total of all institutions – it even defines reality for us! Reality is defined ‘in a rule-based fashion’, in a ‘generic fashion’ and as a result, we inhabit a world that has absolutely no depth to it, a world with no content, a world that is made up of nothing other than ‘defined surfaces’. But this ‘defined world‘ is not reality – it’s something else. It’s a false and hollow world that denies everything that is authentic about us, everything that is real about us. And at the same time this is all our own work – we made it, no one else. We have made an environment for ourselves that functions as an enemy of freedom, an enemy of consciousness, the enemy of anything genuine, and rather than seeing it as ‘such we perceive it to be perfectly benign and helpful.

 

No one is going to understand this assertion of course, for the reasons that we have gone into. It’s pointless bringing the matter up for debate in the media; it’s pointless bringing the crisis to the attention of our leaders and policy-makers. It’s pointless doing this because they themselves are an extension of the very same system we are trying to warn them about, obviously! In the ‘invasion’, they were the first bodies to be snatched – leaders and opinion-makers (anyone right at the core of the social group) always are. It’s no good expecting the system itself to understand this point; it’s no good thinking that the system ought to ‘do something about itself’! This sounds like a very obvious point to make but we absolutely need to make it all the same because – out of our ingrained ‘lack of autonomy’ – we keep expecting on the answer to come from outside of ourselves. We haven’t woken up to the true nature of our predicament yet – the predicament that is the Designed World which we live in and have given all our power to…

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *