Being an adapted member of society is an entirely mechanical kind of thing, which is to say, it is a sublimely non-nuanced. There’s no nuance in mechanical existence whatsoever – not even the subtlest hint of it. The way it works is that we take as much as one can take (we use as much as is readily usable) and then we move on. We extract the benefit from the situation and then – when there’s nothing extractable left – we go in search of the next source of value, the next source of nutrients. We go looking for the next possibility of benefiting ourselves so that we can repeat the basic operation, and we will go on repeating what we’re doing indefinitely – we’d carry on forever if we could. We’ll carry on until something stops us.

The key point to make about this is that there is absolutely no ‘reflection’ going on – we are being mechanically compelled to do whatever it is we have to do in order to satiate ourselves, to ‘service our needs’, and we never reflect on this, we never think about what it means, we never ponder on the curious nature of our situation. ‘How is reflecting going to help us, after all?’ the mechanical mind will scoff in its superior way, ‘there’s nothing practical about philosophical inquiry – that’s just so much airy-fairy nonsense…’ We do what we have to do and then we move on, just like a machine. We ‘do what we do’ and that’s all there is to it – if you were looking for anything else – something ‘extra’, something ‘transcendent’ – then you’d be disappointed. The action is its own justification, and this means that we don’t ever have to look at the bigger picture. Being a machine means never looking at the Big Picture…

Reflecting on what we’re doing doesn’t serve any practical function, it doesn’t serve any ‘purpose’, and so we don’t bother with it. We laugh at anyone who does bother with it – we laugh at them because we can’t understand them, because we can’t even begin to understand them. All we know is the logic of ‘who gets the benefit’ (or ‘who gains the advantage’) and this is a strictly black-and-white business – there’s no fuzziness, no ambiguity at all. All we understand is the logic of ‘going for the advantage’ , the logic of ‘taking’, the logic of ‘extracting value’, the logic of ‘exploitation’, and the only type of person we respect is the type of person who is even more ruthless, even more effective a ‘taker’ or ‘exploiter’ than we are. Such people we look up to and try to emulate as best we can. This is the mechanical mind-set in a nutshell.

If I am ‘a Taker’ then the idea of not taking (if I can take, if there’s nothing actually stopping me from taking) is profoundly mysterious to me – or at least it would be if I thought about it, which I never do. I’m not interested in enigmas, not interested in mysteries, I’m only interested in the practical details of whether something is going to help me or not help me. I’m only interested in whether something is going to be advantageous or disadvantageous to me as regards my unexamined agenda. Everything is rendered in perfectly black-and-white terms in my universe and all I care about is how to leverage advantage or avoid disadvantages. This narrow concern (which Buddhists call ‘attachment’) is the beginning and the end of mechanical existence.

This is what ‘being mechanical’ means therefore – it means not being curious about the world, it means not being interested in anything apart from the burning question of how I can exploit my environment even more effectively, even more efficiently, than I am at the current time. It means that I’m functioning as a machine and not a human being, it means that I have become ‘a machine for seeking the advantage’, living in a world that is largely occupied by other machines whose interest is also purely in ‘automatically seeking the advantage’. Being a machine means that we never question anything, it means that we are never curious about anything. Whatever it is that’s happening automatically becomes normal, whatever task it is we are given we just ‘get on with as a matter of course’ – we get on with it without a second look. We don’t raise an eyebrow, no matter what we’re presented with. Who ever heard of a machine that questions the task that it has been given? It’s our ability to refuse to carry out whatever orders have been given to us that makes us human; it’s our ability to rebel that makes all the difference. If we can’t rebel (if we can’t help agreeing with whatever we’re told to agree with) then we’re just a tool to be causally used by whatever accidental mechanical forces may happen to be out there. We ‘rent ourselves out to the highest bidder’, so to speak. We’ll ‘go along with anything’ and it won’t bother us at all…

Machines don’t ‘reflect on their situation’ – they just do whatever it is that they’re doing without feeling the need to question it. When we are operating in Mechanical Mode then we are ‘automatically compliant with whatever situation it is that we find ourselves in’, and this is – we might therefore say – a complete abdication of all responsibility. From a psychological perspective, ‘being mechanical’ thus represents a perfect way to avoid all responsibility. It represents a perfect invasion of the actual challenge of ‘being real’ or ‘being in reality’ (which we might also refer to (echoing the existential philosophers, as ‘the quintessential risk of existing’). But why should existence be a rest, we might ask, puzzled at this bold assertion. From the mechanical point of view the conditions of existence are simply ‘whatever they are’, and all that is required of us is that we should adapt to them, which is very straightforward. Either we adapt or we don’t, either we win or we lose. Either you’re in or you’re out. Adapting to the B&W requirements of ‘what the situation requires of them’ is what machines do– they’re pragmatic like that, they do what is required of them, they do what is necessary. The problem is however that existence is a negative rather than a positive phenomenon, which means that there is no adapting to it. [‘The Son of God has no place to lay his head.’  – Matthew 8:20] There’s nothing there to adapt to in Negative Reality – it’s not ‘a thing’.

Machines exploit their environment – this is what it means to be a machine – and in order to be able to do so that environment must be understandable in terms of straightforward rules. Once we grasp the relevant rules then we are in a position to exploit the system, to ‘obtain benefit from it’.  Negative existence doesn’t have any rules however – the State of Neg Existence isn’t based on anything, isn’t predicated upon anything; it doesn’t ‘follow rules’ – that’s what positive reality does. Positive reality ‘follows on from precedence’; it ‘follows on from what has already been started’, it ‘copies what was already there’. This is all well and good just as long as there is a hook to hang everything on, of course; when however there IS no precedence to follow, when there IS no rule to exploit, no template to copy from, then that’s when we’re in trouble, and this is precisely the situation when we’re talking about with Negative Existence. Negative existence can’t be ‘exploited’ because we don’t understand anything about it, because there’s nothing to be understood about it. There are no starting-off points, no prompts, no platforms to launch anything from. We see this as meaning that there’s no order there, that there’s nothing there but blankness, which means (as far as we’re concerned, anyway) that what we have here is a situation that’s crying out for us to ‘make of it what we will’. Reality is a lump of putty waiting for us – us being the ‘active agent’ – to bring shape to it. This is the colonialist mindset, we might say – the basic material (which is to say, the ‘unstructured reality’) is of no value in itself (being the mere putty of existence), its only value lies in what we make of it. We’re the important ones here, not the raw, ‘undifferentiated’ being that gives rise to all phenomenal existence…

This is (and always has been) our attitude when we’re in the default Mechanical Mode; our outlook – although we can’t see it – is laughably arrogant, absurdly arrogant. We are arrogant in the way that we automatically assume that whatever kind of order it is that we’re busy reproducing, busy copying out into the world around us, (busy inflicting upon the world) is supremely important and that anything else is – therefore – completely unimportant. This is our attitude in a nutshell – it doesn’t matter how impoverished, how ridiculous how, how downright banal this so-called ‘order’ of ours is, we’re going to be full to the brim – if not overflowing – with this absurd confidence, with the confidence that what we are bringing to the world (or rather imposing on the world) some kind of ‘divine panacea’ whilst everything else is absolutely without value. The more deluded we are the more ‘confident’ we get, and we don’t have to search very hard to come up with examples of this deeply perverse type of behaviour in human history. It’s ‘what we do’…

A machine can only function in a positive world, a defined world, a rigorously structured world. It’s got nothing to go on otherwise – it’s got no way to establish a foothold, no chance of finding an angle to work. If it can’t perform its allotted task – if it can’t do the thing it’s supposed to do – then it can’t ‘know itself to be what it supposedly is’ (so to speak) – it’s ‘ontologically insecure’, it can’t prove its own existence to itself.  [‘What is a soldier without a foe?’ – Robert Wyatt] The other side of this, we could say, is that being a machine (being a human operating in ‘shut-down’ or rule-based mode’) can’t register reality as it is in itself (which is to say, it can’t register Intrinsic Order, which is order that hasn’t been aggressively asserted, which is order that hasn’t been ‘imposed from without’); instead, we project our own biases (which are invisible to us, unknown to us) out onto the world and then act as if this projected reality were the Actual World, thereby neatly sidestepping the problem. The notion that reality might be negative rather than positive never occurs to us; the mechanical mind – being a positive phenomenon itself – cannot conceive of any other possibility than this. The mechanical or ‘rule-based’ outlook cannot give credence (or value, or respect) to anything other than itself; it is for this reason inherently arrogant (and it can’t not be so). To exist in this modality is to exist in isolation from reality itself. This is an essentially narcissistic modality, and so although we are very prone these days to pointing the finger and loudly declaring that someone is ‘selfish’, ‘unfair’, ‘mean’, ‘narcissistic’ or whatever (whenever they don’t do what we want them to do) to do this is to miss the point. That’s how we all are – that’s the way we’re made to be by society; that’s the way we are engineered to be by the machine, by the conditioned reality. This is how the game is played, the only way it can be played. We’re all the same, we’re all this way (when we’re existing in Mechanical / Conditioned / Socially Adapted Mode) but we can only see it in others. We don’t appreciate that other people are giving us a valuable opportunity to see what we’re like – we just think that they’re bad people, rotten people, people who aren’t good or worthy or proper in the way that we are. We don’t see that this is what we’re like. We reject this valuable opportunity to learn something we didn’t know, in other words. We waste it because we just aren’t willing to see something about ourselves that we don’t like, because we simply aren’t up for gaining this painful insight into our own appallingly mechanical nature…

Image credit – grassrootsconnector.substack