Purposeful doing is the repetition of a bias, the reiteration of ingrained prejudice. We get a good feeling from engaging in goal-orientated behaviour because it’s purposeful, because it’s progressive and constructive in nature, because it’s ‘meaningful’ rather than being ‘aimless’ or ‘merely random’, and yet all we’re really doing with our purposeful doing is that we’re saying the same thing over and over again, and the rub here is that what we’re saying isn’t actually true.
It’s not so much that we’re ‘repeating the same point over and over again’ therefore, but that we’re trying to make out that something is true when it simply isn’t. This is how it always is when we’re trying to make something be true when it isn’t, of course – we have to keep on emphasizing that such and such a thing is true precisely because it isn’t. When we make a ‘positive assertion of fact’ then we’re pushing back against the contrary proposition. If it were really true then we wouldn’t have to insist. We wouldn’t have to protest so much, as Shakespeare says. If what we’re asserting could stand up on his own two feet then we wouldn’t need to prop it up (or as we could also say, if whatever it is could happen all by itself then we wouldn’t need to put so much energy into making it happen.
We always focus on what is being done (or what the goal is) and this puts us off the scent completely – the actual goal or purpose isn’t as important as we say it is. Purposeful doing isn’t about what we do (despite the fact as it claims to be) it’s about us being able to make it happen; it’s about us having the purpose, and – crucially – it’s about us being able to ‘fulfil’ it, us being able to ‘bring it about’. More succinctly, it’s about us reinforcing our sense of personal agency. Having a sense of personal agency is the same as having a sense of being this self, being this agent, and there are two ways that this can work out for us – either we are able to enact the purpose that we have in mind or – for whatever reason – we’re not able, and so in this way we either get to be an ‘effective agent’ or an ‘ineffective one’, the ‘winner self’ or the ‘loser self’. To our way of looking at things. being the winner self is the best thing ever. We take credit for everything this way, even though the truth is that it’s got nothing to do with us at all. As in the Zen story, we’re like bandits claiming the Emperor’s gold as our own…
The reason being an effective causal agent is such a wonderfully great thing (according to us) is because this affirms that we really are this ‘purposeful doer’ – the fact that we have successfully achieved our purpose proves the fact. It demonstrates to us that we are the doer, that we are the chooser. We’re able to perceive ourselves this way – we’re able to enjoy this particular illusion, which is the illusion of agency. The key ingredient here is freedom therefore: we are – we believe – free to choose our purpose or goal, and we’re also free to realise it. It’s all our own volition and this is what gives rise to the sense of us being ‘a causal agent’.
This isn’t real freedom however – it isn’t real freedom because we aren’t actually choosing (or doing) anything. If purposeful action is the reiteration or repetition of a bias or prejudice, as we have said, then there can’t be any freedom in this; the bias or prejudice is controlling us, and not vice versa! We’ve got it the wrong way around; we don’t have any freedom in this situation at all – the bias dictates what happens and we hurry to obey. We are ‘the servants of the bias’. There’s a bit more to it than this, however – when I act out a bias I don’t go around thinking ‘I am acting out a bias’ (although this is what is actually happening) but rather I experience myself to be ‘making a choice’, I experienced myself to be ‘acting volitionally’. This is what sociologist Stuart Hall calls false spontaneity – we mouth endless tiresome cliches whilst imagining that we’re being witty and original…
In order for us to be genuinely spontaneous – which is to say, genuinely free in ourselves – there can’t be any bias, there can’t be any hidden ‘weighting factor’ – very clearly, if there is a hidden biassing factor then there can’t be any freedom! We might think that there is freedom here – since as far as we’re concerned there’s no bias – but there isn’t, there is only the false impression of freedom. The acting out of a rule that we have in our head isn’t spontaneity, it is – on the contrary – a foregone conclusion. It sounds very nice to be spontaneous – we all aspire to this state of being – but in practise something holds us back. What holds us back is something that we never stop to consider: Spontaneous Mode doesn’t facilitate the familiar illusion of there being a ‘Chooser’ (or ‘Doer’) in the way that Purposeful Mode does.
Constantly having a purpose or goal in mind is what allows us to perceive that there is a Chooser or a Doer, and that we are that ‘executive agent’ it’s the only way we can get to have this particular experience. To be spontaneous is to be perfectly unaware of what we’re going to say or do next – no intention is involved and so there’s no way we can claim authorship for what happens. There’s ‘action’, but no ‘actor’. There’s no way in which we can feel good on account of it and say that it was us who did this, or us who did that. Stuff ‘does itself’ when we’re being spontaneous and what this means is that there’s no one to thank (or no one to blame) for it. There’s no agent behind it, there’s no controller pulling the strings.
Just to repeat the point here, there’s no way that we can have the experience of being the ‘executor of decisions’, the ‘heroic enactor of a vision’ (which is to say, the purposeful self) in the absence of bias, in the absence of prejudice. I say that I am ‘the Chooser’ (which implies that I could have chosen something completely different if I’d wanted or chosen nothing at all) but this is only a very superficial illusion there never was any choice. We act out what we have been set up to act out, without knowing that we have been set up, without knowing that we are merely ‘obeying our conditioning’ like so many wind-up toys. In our ignorance, we believe ourselves to be autonomous beings; in our ignorance, we believe ourselves to be ‘freestanding autonomous entities’, not merely the output of a machine we know nothing about. We believe ourselves to be ‘the causer’ not ‘the caused’.
This is of course ‘ignorance that we wish to hold onto’ since it is only because we can’t see what’s really going on that we can carry on believing that we are ‘ourselves’, that we can carry on being ‘what we take ourselves to be’, what everyone (including ourselves) say we are. To suddenly see that all of this purposefulness, all of this choosing, all of this doing, all of this controlling, is no more than a shiny red herring whose purpose is to tie us up in knots and stop us seeing who we really are (which is something incomprehensibly vaster than this) is an utterly terrifying thing for us and we absolutely don’t want anything to do with it. We never see beyond the loss of ‘who we thought we are’ and so as a result we can’t get past the terror. We can’t say that the ‘bad news’ is really the ‘good news’, and so we never get to know the good news. Instead, we carry on as we are, walking in shadow – the self-deluding ‘slaves of the bias’, the ‘prisoners of our programming’…
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