What We Always Do

What we always do is that we ‘fire off’ enthusiastically on the basis of unexamined assumptions. We always always always do this! We’re always kicking off, firing off, taking off, letting loose on the basis of assumptions that we have absolutely no interest in looking into. All our interest goes the other way – all our interest is in moving in the opposite direction entirely to ‘examining’. This utterly preposterous behaviour is what it means to be human. It’s the name of the game, really…

 

 

It’s an amazing thing but when everyone does this – as indeed everyone does – then it seems very normal indeed. We’re all doing it all of the time and so of course it seems normal. We’re busy firing off on the basis of our unexamined assumptions and that’s just what we do. There’s nothing more to say about it…

 

 

There’s a hypnotic quality to this game – we all want to join in and when we do we can’t stop. We’re like the crowds cheering Hitler when he made his big speeches. We don’t know why we’re cheering like crazy – we just do it. We’re going along with what everyone else is doing because it’s so contagious. It’s not just that we can’t stop however, we don’t want to! And it’s not just that we don’t want to stop either – we don’t have any concept of stopping, we don’t comprehend that there is any such thing. We don’t see that there is any such thing as ‘stopping’ because acting on the basis of our assumptions is the only thing there is as far as we are concerned. Due to the hypnotic quality of what we’re doing, we understand ‘firing off on the basis of assumptions’ to be the whole of what is possible. That’s the whole world to us.

 

 

There is another direction we could go in of course but we just don’t know about it. It’s not part of our world of ‘agreeing with what’s going on’. When we throw ourselves into this business of ‘conforming to the given reality’ we don’t actually see ourselves as ‘conforming’ – conforming has become the whole world to us and so there is no such thing as conforming. There is only ‘living in the world as it is’ and there’s no choice about this. We don’t even consider the possibility that there could have been a choice. The logic of the situation is so obvious that the only thing to do is ‘go along with it’ and this ‘going along with the logic of the situation’ isn’t seen as ‘going along’ at all. It’s just normal. When ‘the logic of the situation’ is the whole world then there’s no need for anyone to remark on the fact that we’re going along with it!

 

 

The ‘other direction’ that we just mentioned is not to fight against the logic (fighting against the logic of the situation is the logic of the situation because we’ve been tricked into operating with the given framework) but to question it. Questioning is the ‘missing piece’; it is a capacity of ours that we have just plain forgotten about. The capacity to question what is presented to us – in any meaningful way – is something that no longer exists for us. It has been ‘switched off’. It has been ‘knocked off’. It has been deactivated. ‘Questioning’ is a word that we have never heard of, it’s a concept we just don’t get. People will stare at you blankly if you talk about it. When we are in the ‘hypnotized state’ of doing what everyone else is doing then we don’t have any concept of ‘not being hypnotized’; when we are preoccupied with the need to adapt to the given situation then the word ‘question’ just isn’t in our vocabulary. Questioning is non-adaptive, after all – it’s an activity that has no pay-off within the terms of the framework that we have tacitly accepted as being ‘the world’. Why would anyone engage in an activity that has no pay-off?

 

 

The only reason that the world which we have created for ourselves with our unreflective conformity doesn’t seem peculiar or down-right bizarre to us is because we have had our capacity to question switched off at a very early age. We will automatically adapt to whatever bizarrely distorted set-up it is that is presented to us and once we have adapted to it it will always seem normal. It has to seem normal to us because we have lost our ability to question. It has to seem normal to us because all we are interested in is ‘adapting to the logic of the situation with which we have been presented’. That’s where the pay-off lies. It’s as if we are infinitely gullible, and will believe whatever cock-and-bull story that is put in front of us. To hear the lie is to believe it. When this is the case – when we are this gullible – what sort of situation will we create for ourselves? What sort of leaders will we attract?

 

 

When the obvious logic of the presented situation is the whole world to us – as it is when we adapt to it – then there is simply no question of us ‘not going along with it’, as we have already said. We’re being coerced, we’re being compelled to go along with the system, but because that system has become everything to us we can no longer see coercion as coercion, we can no longer see compulsion as compulsion. We have adapted to the coercive situation and so it no longer seems coercive to us. Instead of seeing the force that we are conforming to as an external compulsion that is being arbitrarily imposed on us – which is the truth of the situation – we see going along with it as simply ‘the right thing to do’. We see agreeing with the compulsion as ‘the right thing to do’ and not agreeing with it as fundamentally wrong. It’s not ‘wrong according to the coercive system’, it’s just plain wrong. It’s a fault. It’s an error that needs to be stamped out.

 

 

Questioning the system is wrong. Naturally questioning (or not adapting to) the system is wrong according to the system itself – we can take that as read. Naturally disobeying the rule is wrong with regard to the rule itself – that’s in the nature of the rule. That’s how rules work. That’s how the rule gets to be a rule – by agreeing with its own narrow logic no matter what. The rule gets to be the rule by ignoring anything outside of it. But when the rule becomes the whole world – which it will if we go along with it – then questioning the rule becomes an impossibility. The world that is created by going along with the logic of the situation is a world that contains nothing else but that logic, and that logic doesn’t have the capacity to question itself. It’s not built that way…

 

 

If it is the case that we can no longer see the coercive system as being coercive then this is telling us something very important. This is telling us something we really ought to know. If we can no longer see the coercive system as being coercive then what this means is that we have become the system. In simple old-fashioned terms, we have been possessed….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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