The Universe of Confirmation is a push me / pull you sort of an affair – it is both the carrot and the stick. The Universe of Confirmation has two forces in it – the force of validation and the force of devalidation, and nothing else. This provides a very ‘oversimplified’ sort of an environment for us to operate within, all the more so when we see that validation and devalidation, <yes> and <no> are – when it comes down to it – the same thing. Both equal confirmation, both come down to ‘the confirmation of our underlying biases’, even though it doesn’t look like it. <Yes> and <No> are both ‘confirmation’ because they both confirm the same basic idea, which is that our proposed approach to reality, our proposed conception of reality is somehow relevant to reality itself. ‘Right versus wrong’ is only meaningful in a world that is and the only closed worlds that exist are those that we ourselves have invented.  

When we’re operating within this environment, within these terms, then the logic of the situation is utterly overwhelming – we can’t see through it at all. We absolutely can’t see through it and so we’re compelled to obey it in all things (or at the least, try our very best to obey it). Obeying is all we know. The Universe of Confirmation is a coercive situation, therefore; it can’t be anything else but coercive – that’s its only trick. It is a trick however – it’s a trick because (as we’ve said) right versus wrong can’t exist outside of the continuum, outside of universe of confirmation. We have to ‘agree on terms’ before there can be a right or a wrong, but both YES and No come out of these assumed terms… The idea of ‘the right way versus the wrong way’ doesn’t come out of thin air, in other words – if there is to be this polarity, then we are obliged to agree to see the world in a certain type of way. If we want to live in a world that can be exhaustively represented a world that can be represented in terms of black-and-white statements (i.e., a Positive World) then we have to ‘put the blinkers on’ (no blinkers means no <right> and no <wrong>, no <up> and no <down., no <in> and no <out>, and so on).

Essentially, we have to agree to let the Universe of Confirmation define everything about us and everything about everything else too (which it will do in a shot, if we let it). We have to ‘go along with the terms,’ in other words, and this is something we can’t help doing once we have allowed ourselves to be defined. We’re in its power – to be defined by the Universe of Confirmation is to be told what is real and what is not real, what is true and what is a lie, and once we have been told this (in such a way that we’re not allowed to question it, or even think of questioning it) then we have no choice but to do our best to fulfil the obligations that have been placed upon us. To be defined is to be imprisoned in a very thorough way; to be defined is to lose all of our freedom, all in the one go. It is only the part of us that isn’t defined (only the part that hasn’t been pinned down by the system of thought) that is free.

We don’t see this however, we don’t see it because freedom has been reformulated for us in a conditional way (which is to say, it has been defined as something we have to obtain or win, by doing the right thing and not the wrong thing). Nothing is free in the universe of confirmation, not even freedom! Everything has to be done, everything has to be deserved, and the way we go about deserving anything good, anything worthwhile, is by fulfilling all the obligations that have been placed upon us. It’s not as if we go around feeling unfree in this world of course because for the most part we don’t; rather, our situation is that we frame our freedom in terms of being able to fulfil the compulsions we’re supposed to fulfil, until we attain whatever it is that we are supposed to attain. ‘Freedom plays second fiddle to our goals’, in other words, and the rub here is that they aren’t really ‘our’ goals at all… The type of freedom we experience ourselves to have in the UOC is ‘the freedom to do the ‘right’ thing and thereby obtain some benefit’, some (supposed) benefit that has been defined in advance for us by the system, just like everything else in the show.

By going through all of this in the way that we just have done we are now able to see just how absurd this set-up is. It’s not possible to have a more absurd situation than this – the type of freedom we are being presented with is nothing more than a thinly disguised form of slavery. The goals that we strive to obtain have been imposed on us by the determinate environment have been imposed without us knowing it and the benefit we (supposedly) stand to obtain as a result of achieving them is likewise ‘an artefact of the system’. The whole thing is one big fat meaningless tautology, a big fat meaningless tautology that we can’t for the life of us see through. It’s nonsense but we can’t see that it’s nonsense. All the system can ever provide us with is itself and ‘itself’ (i.e., the Universe of Confirmation) isn’t actually anything. ‘Right versus wrong’ isn’t a real thing – it’s just something that seems to be real when we agree (without knowing it) to follow the rules of the game. If we have made an agreement to be follow a bunch of rules – and have also agreed to completely forget the fact that such an agreement has ever taken place – then the result of this – needless to say – is that we are ‘unfree without knowing it’. We’re under some sort of spell.

Instead of saying that the Universe of Confirmation provides us with a very oversimplified (which is to say, ‘informationally degraded’) world for us to operate within we could just as well say that it provides us with a null world for us to live in. It’s a ‘null world’ because there is no actual content there – we are being hoaxed into believing that there is content when there just plain isn’t. It’s true that we often experience our existence in this world as being unsatisfactory, frustrating or ‘lacking in something that we can’t quite put our finger on’, but we understand this to be because we haven’t yet ‘got it right’ according to the rules of the game. This way of looking at it leads us to try even harder within the terms that we have been provided with, which of course only serves to exacerbate the situation. Trying hard to succeed within a system that is glitched, a system that is a double bind, isn’t the helpful thing to do! What we’re looking at here (as Alan Watts has observed) is a psychological version of the finger trap – the more desperately we try to pull our finger out, the more the trap tightens around it. What drives this is our fear, which stops us looking clearly at our situation and causes us to grasp blindly at the rules with which we have been provided, which are supposed to free us. Fear causes us to construct our own prison, in other words, and once we’re in it then fear will keep us there.

All our trust is in the distorted version of reality that we have been provided with by the False Creator (by ‘the System of Thought’) and as a result we have no trust left in our own actual awareness of the situation. This is what always happens when we adapt to a system, when we allow ourselves to be defined or determined by that system – the system makes us in its own image, and then it proceeds to lord it over us (which it is now perfectly entitled to do). What we’re calling ‘the Universe of Confirmation’ doesn’t really exist however – it’s just ‘an abstract situation that we have given our power over to’, as we have been saying. It’s just a game. It’s ‘an artificial world which is made up of arbitrary biases that we have tacitly agreed upon (and which – therefore – we have also tacitly agreed to not to look beyond). These biases (or prejudices) then become absolute as far as we’re concerned – they become absolute and they shut us down completely. We no longer have the freedom to see the biases that the system is made up of as being ‘purely arbitrary’; instead, they have become ‘rules which have to be unthinkingly obeyed’.

This is how the system ‘makes us in its own image’, just like God in the Old Testament. We lose all individuality, we lose everything about us that’s actually real, and instead we ‘become what we aren’t’, which places us firmly under the ‘jurisdiction of the Demiurge’, so to speak. We’re in Caesar’s realm, so we have to pay Caesar what is rightfully due to him. If we were to somehow overthrow Caesar, then nothing would have changed – if we defeat Caesar then we become the new Caesar. In the words of Philip K Dick:

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox: whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.

The idea of ‘becoming free’, the idea of becoming ‘gloriously liberated on the basis of who we’re not’ (i.e., on the basis of ‘who the Demiurge, in all his malevolence, says we are) is of course patently nonsensical. What could be more twisted than this? It’s frankly ridiculous and yet it is this ‘projected ridiculous outcome’ that we place all our hopes on. Our state of mind is such that we are fundamentally disinterested in anything else apart from this outcome – we couldn’t be more disinterested. We’ve put all our money on an outcome that is truly absurd, and we won’t risk looking at what we’re doing in case we accidentally see the truth. To be actually aware during the course of our day-to-day lives is a risk that we simply can’t afford to take…

Image credit – nightcafe.studio