When all risk is removed from the picture (or from our lives) – leaving us in what we might call the Zero Risk Environment then the spirit within us – so to speak – suffocates. If this unnatural situation continues then the light will go out entirely (as has been so often noted). In short, ‘the removal of all risk’ is not at all a beneficial situation for us – it’s a living death. There is no more inimical situation, there is no greater form of oppression…

Living in the ZRE is ‘a death sentence for the spirit’ and yet – at the same time – it’s what we’re all aiming for. It’s what we all want. This is what is considered by all and sundry as ‘the universal good’. Whether we admit it or not, we see the Zero Risk Environment as being the ideal situation, the answer to all our problems. Then – and only then – can we be happy, we say. Rational civilization always works towards eliminating risk; what’s more, this is no ‘trivial tendency’ that can be modified or altered or ‘educated against’ because this is the way that rationality itself functions.

Logic is all about eliminating risk – that’s ‘its thing’, that’s what it does. That’s the whole point, that’s what makes it be logic. Logic works on the basis of so-called ‘axiomatic truths’ – it operates by extrapolating from these axiomatic truths and thereby reaching definite conclusions. A definite conclusion is as magnetically attractive to us as it is because there is – by definition – ‘zero risk of it ever being anything else’. From a psychological point of view, a definite conclusion equals no risk – there’s no risk of what we have concluding turning out to be anything other than what we have just concluded it to be, what we have taken it as being, and this ontological security tastes super-sweet to us. Nothing ever tasted sweeter. That’s what we all want and by the same token ontological risk is absolutely what we don’t want; we align ourselves with thoughts as wholeheartedly (or rather as fanatically) as we do because of this, therefore. The Mind-Created Virtual Reality is a ‘zero risk environment’ and that’s what draws us (so fatally) to it.

When there’s no risk then – as we all know, even if we don’t particularly dwell on it – life gets very flat. It gets completely flat and when life is completely flat like this it ceases to be life. Instead, it becomes a form of torture, it becomes an extraordinarily unpleasant kind of a thing. It’s not just ‘extraordinarily unpleasant’ – it is – in the end – unendurable. It is the state of ‘privation’ that Thomas Aquinas wrote of. We can only endure it (however temporarily) by lying to ourselves, distracting ourselves, or by passing the pain on to someone else via some form of abuse. This is where what we call ‘human evil’ comes from, we might say. We can’t just ‘take up residence in the Zero Risk Environment’ therefore; that is – ultimately – quite untenable. It’s not good simply to restrict ourselves to the MCVR, we have to restrict ourselves to the MCVR but not let ourselves know that we have done so; we have to limit ourselves to what is essentially a hideously sterile game and then put all of our energy into validating that game for ourselves (so as to say that it isn’t sterile). We can’t allow ourselves to see that the hollow rigmarole which is the Simulation is a ‘hollow rigmarole’ and for this reason we have to dedicate all our time and energy to trying (in what is as we have said ultimately a futile way) to prove otherwise to ourselves.

One way of explaining how we do this is to talk in terms of the phenomenon of ‘inverted risk’ and say that the reason we don’t miss what we are seeking illegitimately to avoid (which is ‘the ontological risk’ of not being able to know what reality is, or what our existence within it means, or what anything means) is because we turn Ontological Risk (which is to say, Radical Uncertainty) on its head to make it into ‘the reverse of itself’. Instead of RISK, in its original or true guise, what we relate to instead is ‘the risk of not being able to control satisfactorily’, ‘the risk of not being able to obtain our goals’, ‘the risk of messing up’, ‘the risk of the bad thing happening’, which is of course something we all understand very well indeed. Who doesn’t understand this? What we’re talking about here is the risk of FAILING, the risk of ‘becoming a LOSER’ and this is what we exclusively concern ourselves with (in place of anything that is actually real). We relate to Inverted Risk instead of relating to Radical Uncertainty. Crucially therefore, we don’t see what we’re doing here, we don’t see trivial uncertainty as being as being an ‘inversion’ of actual uncertainty, an inversion of actual OR, but simply as ‘what’s really important’, ‘what we should be concerning ourselves with’, etc., etc. The reality that the rational mind presents us with is fundamentally ‘non-nuanced’ – it’s ‘just the way things are’ and so there’s no scope for any actual curiosity (or ‘interest’) here…

If we go back to what we have just said about the necessity to continuously distract ourselves (without any let up) out attention from the terrible flatness of the ZRE, then it’s clear that our task is not to achieve this goal or that goal – that’s merely ‘the two-dimensional storyline’ – but to keep ourselves from seeing just how abysmal an existence it is to be always avoiding what we might call ‘the legitimate risk of living’ as if this avoidance of risk were somehow a good thing. Needless to say however, it isn’t ‘a good thing’; we’ve gotten rid of all genuine ontological risk – which is what makes us feel alive, what makes us feel that we’re actually living – and so we have to switch over from ‘risk’ to an alternative operating system which is where we replace <risk> with its inverse, which is the risk of allowing risk to be there’ (which is to say, ‘the risk of us realising that risk CAN’T be eliminated). If ontological security is ‘the risk of discovering that things aren’t what we think they are’ then what we’re talking about here is the risk that we might fail in the task of covering the risk up (or ‘fail as regards the unacknowledged task of preventing ourselves from being aware that there even IS such a thing as ontological risk). If you were to try to articulate this point then we’ would simply look at you blankly – you’ve gone beyond what we want to know about. What we’re referring to as second order risk is therefore ‘the risk of knowing that there is such a thing as radical risk’.

Second order risk is necessarily opaque in nature – which is to say, we can’t see through it, we can’t see what it’s really about. It’s a screen we can’t penetrate. If we became aware that SOR was only a decoy or baffle covering up something deeper then it would have already failed – it would no longer be opaque. The bigger picture would at this point start to show itself and that’s precisely what we don’t want to happen; we would then ‘know that there’s something that we don’t want to know about’. The game would be up in this case – we’d be sniffing a rat. To see through second order risk reveals first order risk; once we see that our goals aren’t important in themselves but only matters because they distract us from ‘something else’ then our comfort zone is of course busted wide open. Complacency evaporates and the icy-cold awareness of a ‘plot’ (that we know about but which no one else does) sets in. There isa plot going on. That’s the whole point – we are plotting against ourselves so that we don’t get to know that the universe is ‘risky’ in a way in a way we don’t want to ever find out about (the risk being that we might see that the world isn’t really what we think it is). Just as long as we believe in the bland, flavourless surety of ‘things being no more than what they seem to be’ there is no ontological insecurity; to doubt this at all marks a departure from the comfortable-but-dull world that we used to believe in into a wide-open realm in which anything could be true (for all we know). This corresponds to what Joseph Campbell has called ‘The Hero’s Journey’ and the thing about the Hero’s journey is of course that one has to be a hero to set forth on it…

Our ‘task’ (which is a task that we can’t ever let ourselves know about) is to avoid at all costs seeing that the concept we have in our heads about ‘life, the universe and everything’ is only a concept. Our task is to protect ourselves from seeing that the Simulation is a simulation, in other words. What we’re calling ‘second order risk’ derives from the trivial uncertainty of not knowing whether our plans will bear fruit or not, whether our goals will be realised or not. This is the ‘issue’ that soaks up all our attention (like blotting paper soaks up ink) and prevents us from dwelling on our situation in any depth. Depth is the enemy here. Whether our purposeful behaviour goes to plan or not is a very big deal to us, in other words – this is the ‘inverted risk’ that we are so concerned about. Because we’re protecting – as best we can – ourselves from this trivial risk (which doesn’t seem trivial to us!) we are – although we don’t know it – safeguarding ourselves against seeing that the game we’re playing is only a game. The jubilation we feel when we succeed in obtaining our goals is a displacement of our surpassingly great fear of discovering that ‘things aren’t what they seem to be’, our surpassingly great fear of discovering that the Simulation is only that. What we’re safeguarding ourselves against in our games is the risk of encountering the actual reality, therefore.

How else would we define the Simulation, after all, other than our defence against the risk of encountering reality? It couldn’t be any other way since if we did come across anything that was actually real then that would immediately mark the end of the Simulation. The Mind-Created Virtual reality only works in the complete absence of anything else, and this puts a different meaning entirely to the well-known passage from Exodus 34:11 – ‘For thou shall worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God’. The Simulation only works when there is nothing that is not the Simulation, just as a lie cannot exist in the presence of truth, just as a shadow can’t be there when light is coming from every direction. This therefore is the nature of the simulated world in which we live – it’s all it’s just all the one thing repeated ad nauseam so as to bury or block out everything else. It’s all just the very same point that is reiterated so often that it has become completely meaningless – the way things do when you repeat them too much. It could be said that we have ‘won’ (!) – but only at the price of degraded everything to hollow nonsense, only at the price of creating the ‘Garbage World’. The only point of view propagated the official point of view, the generic point of view, and we are all obedient to it; we don’t even know that we’re being obedient (since we don’t know that there’s any alternative). To suggest that there might be another possibility – an alternative to what everyone else is buying into is ‘heresy’, is dangerous talk that has to be clamped down on immediately. This is the Simulation therefore, and this is also fear. The Simulation is fear…

When it comes to fear then conformity is the golden rule and if there is one who disobeys this the rule – the rule of universal unquestioning conformity – then this denied fear is activated and visited (with great violence) upon the head of the one who has broken the rule, the one who dares to be other than what the rule says they must be. We are angry with them for showing us our fear and our anger is at the same time the mechanism or trick by which we avoid being aware of the fear. We visit our fear upon their heads with full force but instead of experiencing what’s happening honestly we turn it all around, we ‘flip it around’ in order remain unconscious of our fear. We flip it by blaming the offender for ‘doing the bad thing’ and our reaction is so immediate and so unreflective that we never have to notice what this supposed ‘bad thing’ is. We just know [1] that it’s ‘bad’ and [2] that it’s outside of us, external to us, and this means that we have neatly avoided experiencing fear within us (which is of course where it rightly belongs). The anger is the fear, therefore – that’s what fear looks like when we reject it and punish someone else for it. We punish the hapless scapegoat get ourselves of the hook. Our fear then becomes someone else’s suffering – we sacrifice the truth-bearer for the sake of the Lie. The truth-bearer – ultimately – is the ‘true individual’ – the one who does not conform, the one who does not subscribe to the collective lie, the one who isn’t part of the universal conspiracy to ‘say that things are what they aren’t’. There’s no individual there behind the anger therefore – there is only the System. There is only the System defending itself against ‘radical risk’, defending itself against reality, which is the only thing it can do, which is what it always does.

Image credit –mythlok.com