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The mind’s failure to consciously recognize how comprehensively it can be fooled by others as well as by itself has distorting consequences for its view of social reality. We are both creators and victims of cultures that are riddled with illusions, and this is not always easy to see – precisely because our many stratagems in this area are so effective.
In part, the overall phenomenon appears rooted in our tendency to believe our own publicity – that is, to be personally taken in by all the beliefs, ideas and acts we adopt as navigation aids for our own particular path within our own small corner of social reality. Basically, we come to believe in our identity, its persona, and the often-reflexive acts that defend and protect us against a potentially hostile world.
The psychological usefulness of whatever is thereby espoused lies in the resultant ability to persuade others – both as regards whatever roles we enact, and of some legitimacy behind our intentions. And as maximizing the social effectiveness of all this involves the presentation of a deep conviction in whatever we go about, we too easily forget or ignore that we are in fact only acting. Our true motivations remain rather self-centered in manners that we ourselves too easily overlook.
But much as a solid conviction in some image of the self may prove personally useful and minimize each individual’s internal conflict, such advantages are arguably socially disruptive on a more general level. Given people are generally taken in by what is in truth just a façade designed to extract social benefit, the unfortunate result within the bigger picture is a society of an inherently illusory and somewhat deceptive character. Unless one is very astute at unmasking people, they can appear other than they really are.
If acting is basically about creating a somewhat false impression, the mix of ideas each mind has amassed regarding others and society in general is liable to be somewhat askew. Whereas the conventional idea regarding the adoption of personal views is that we simply think things through and arrive at our own opinions, common sense and frankness regarding social reality would suggest the individual’s specific culture and community must be far more influential than such a view allows. This is easily seen by simply observing the tendency for prominent religious and political ideas to persist from one generation to the next within any given population, group or family.
More generally, it can be considered that adopted ideas and beliefs are best understood as social tools and skills, as opposed to rationally-derived convictions. In addition to the apparent social advantages of embracing whatever is popular within the individual’s community, more specific ideas justifying one’s personal profession and lifestyle also serve to cement social standing with whoever is taken in. Hence, just about everyone appears to have ready-made arguments to rebuke whatever criticisms might target them on a personal front. But the other side of this self-defensive mentality is that few people can honestly claim their life choices to be based on independent thinking. Similarly, few can deny that their natural fear of not fitting in steers many of their actions.
That we habitually wear masks is revealed on the odd occasion when raw emotions such as extreme anger sweep the normal state of consciousness aside and appear to take direct control of both physiological and mental states – typically evidenced by rather impetuous and uncontrolled reactions to others. Notably, this is a condition culture teaches us to frown upon within the idea that the relevant individual has lost self-control. However, such emotional outbursts only suggest our habitual attachment to good behavior and acceptable ideas is merely a civilized veneer hiding more visceral instincts and motives – the very idea of a self in control of itself being logically dubious in any case. Loss of such supposed self-control becomes likely when others ignore the normal protocols of maintaining a certain polite social distance and avoiding blunt conversation. At such times, the resultant internal panic and uncertainty can manifest itself as some retaliatory outburst that breaks normal taboos and reveals the conventional idea of a self in control of itself to be a flawed perspective.
Within the process of maturing, we are tacitly encouraged to ignore the fact that adult social conduct is largely about acting on a social stage and is therefore centered on thinking, planning, expressing ideas and conducting oneself in the pursuit of personal outcomes, rather than seeking a useful understanding of our true place within the grander scheme of things. Success is invariably framed in personal terms, with the social reality in which such success is pursued being seen as just a given. But even if believing in oneself may appear socially useful on a personal level, we obviously cannot expect anything other than a troubled society if we all fall for each other’s façades whilst also pursuing our own ability to dupe others. The current schismatic nature of society is the evidence.
The multitude of resultant delusions haunting our social reality is arguably tragic in terms of how extensively we misunderstand one another. Problems in this area seem centered on some inability, fear or other unwillingness to look beyond superficial social presentation and see our fellow humans behind the masks they wear. Given the duplicity and rather impersonal nature of all our otherwise respectable social acts, modern civilized humans may in fact be losing deeper connections that are otherwise natural and socially important to herd members of the same species. We certainly objectify each other in terms of profession, religious and political orientation, level of wealth, nationality and other parameters unseen in other species. With minds overly fixated on all such aspects of personal identity whilst also pursuing their own individualistic goals, attention is too easily focused on what are inconsequential and rather meaningless issues in relation to transcending the social problems all this creates.
The result is arguably a lack of genuine insight into both ourselves and others, if not a subliminal fear that we might discover social reality to be significantly different from what we imagine. But such a significant difference may ironically be that we are in fact incredibly similar to one another at a deeper level, and not the terribly unique people we imagine when carving out our personal niches in today’s dehumanizing societies. If the desire to appear as an interesting and unique individual is at odds with the primitive instinct to fit in with the herd, it’s little wonder that properly accepting our common humanity eludes us.
How we divide
The general blindness to how much we have in common with our fellow beings becomes obvious where for example, members of a given church are discussed as if the doctrines of that church correctly and fully define them – usually in manners that separate them off from non-members. More specifically, supposedly intelligent people can be found debating the belief system of the church without any apparent awareness that their own interpretations of that belief system are something at best tenuously linked to the reality of the church members. The supposed wisdom is often framed within apparently informed statements regarding what these people really believe, but almost never considers that self-identifying as a member of any group can actually be a very trivial matter within the entirety of a person’s ideas, opinions and overall relationship with the wider world. The foolishness of this approach is further compounded by the fact that many religious texts and beliefs remain open to subjective interpretation – even to the point that some actively encourage personal quests, with doctrine playing no more than a catalytic role.
The pigeonholing of huge numbers of people within simplistic definitions by which both the totality of each person and their uniqueness are all but erased is a philosophically idiotic and socially careless act with divisive consequences. The mind no longer views people thus deprived of shared human strengths and vulnerabilities as brothers and sisters of the same species; they are instead grouped as a subset of humanity that effectively thinks with all the prejudices the mind chooses to attach to them. And they are easily painted as the enemy for no better reason than that some mix of fear and stupidity sees them as different.
When the brain is often regarded as the most complex entity known – or more correctly, not known – to mankind, just how stupid is it to imagine that others can be understood by simply examining some book or doctrine to which they occasionally express allegiance? Do we imagine the complex labyrinth of child psychology to be revealed by studying whatever fairy tales a particular child happens to prefer? Are culture’s serious attitudes towards religious tales of reality not just reflexive social norms regarding all metaphysical beliefs, as opposed to tools for gaining real insights regarding whoever claims to hold such beliefs? Careful observation actually reveals that no matter how unshakable anyone’s ideological utterances on anything might sound, their own idea of their true and complete conviction in such matters is somewhat an act of self-deception – their real-world behavior often contradicting whatever doctrine they profess to follow. It can even seem that their outward show of conviction exists exactly because it helps mask and suppress their inner doubt.
So, should the stance of some who would comprehensively mock religious texts whilst simultaneously insisting that others are wholly taken in by those same texts, be seen as a genuine attempt to highlight the true nature of religious belief? Or does such a stance demonstrate their own failure to recognize the powerful human motivation to align with anything at all that proves socially supportive within each individual’s cultural space? If such minds better understood their own lack of critical thinking, they might better understand the same lack in others.
From buddhism to fascism, many individuals have shaped a life for themselves by banging one ideological drum or another – be the goal offered to whoever is taken in anything from personal enlightenment to ruling a people or exploiting others via ideas of certain sacrifices to be paid in return for a better tomorrow or a heaven in some hereafter. Preaching doctrine has been a massively powerful and manipulative stratagem throughout all recorded history. And regardless of the exact nature of any doctrine’s promised rewards, any idea the gullible individual would turn his back on those rewards is every bit as illogical as the idea he might choose not to breathe. Hence, behind all the superficial differences of our complex cultures and civilizations, perhaps we are all both preachers and followers of one thing or another to greater or lesser degrees. Different as our many tales of reality may be, we are all members of the same story-telling species.
The scientist in his quasi-atheism is not so very different from the pious man-of-god, who is not so different from the ruthless financier, who in turn shares something with the wandering hobo. All of them rise in the morning with the lot that is their personal existence, plus their learned relationship to the world around them and the skills they have amassed to navigate their specific situation within a threatening world. We are the people fate has made us, and we mostly seek out optimal conditions for who we are – highly subliminal as the process of doing so may be. We therefore continue wearing more or less the same persona from day to day. The fact that modern societies provide a plethora of different scripts and stages to apparently choose from does not change our evolutionary impulse to make our home wherever our acting skills will be most appreciated and therefore offer us some livable form of security.
Hence, the anger expressed by the anti-capitalist becomes as valid or pointless as the frustration of the business chief who sees nothing but obstructions on the road to his maximized profits. Similarly, judging the criminal drug-dealer, the murderer, or even the genocidal dictator as somehow worse than for example, the voluntary charity worker or the conscientious dropout, can be seen as nothing more profound than the grooming and championing of one’s personal value system. We may be – as most of us appear to be – attached to those value systems at a very deep level, but it is notable how those who live smugly in the comfort zone of seeming moral rectitude are the quickest to voice such judgmental self-righteousness. Others simply do not indulge themselves in claims of moral supremacy – their instinctive drives perhaps caring little for the pretentious art of ideological self-aggrandizement amid life’s sometimes-ruthless struggle for mere survival. Evolution only recognizes survivors in any case. In this sense at least, the murderous drug baron who survives effectively wins out over all the pious martyrs of seemingly lofty causes.
The practice of judging others according to one’s own moral scorecard appears peculiarly human and believably originates in the use of basic doctrinal ideas of good and evil to control minds. Rules of conduct supposedly handed down from some all-powerful deity have proven only too handy to many ruling minorities who thereby claimed authority-by-proxy. Such a stratagem fosters a mentality in which laws are deemed beyond any human interrogation, whilst the individual must be his own policeman – or risk untoward consequences such as literally going to hell. Hence, even where religion has since declined, ideas of supposed moral rectitude are still viable as a means of enforcing obedience to authority. However, in the absence of any divine guidance, who can authoritatively claim to define the relevant concepts of good and evil?
In a world often appearing inherently competitive – both in terms of human society and as regards mere biological survival – is the supposed good of some not necessarily pursued at the cost of others? Nobody ever had to worry about the heavens and hells reaching standing-room-only capacity, but within this material world it is glaringly obvious that resources are limited and that an abundance for some easily translates into a shortage for others. Winning, it can appear, requires losers.
Ecological blindness
The biological resources of the planet function by constant recycling – death appearing an inherent precondition for new life, with both living and decaying organic materials of each life form becoming the sustenance of others. In terms of looking after this planet as our home, failure to accommodate this truth within any plans for human cohabitation is simply eating the food off the table whilst disregarding that nature needs to replenish it.
This profound interdependence of lifeforms renders the biosphere susceptible to a general collapse of life in the face of any sustained onslaught on the planet’s biology – something now a manifest symptom of human environmental interference. Given life naturally evolves for existing conditions, any drastic change in those conditions is disruptive at the very least and has the potential to trigger chain-reactions of death and extinction.
As regards living resources, the situation should be seen as one in which continued availability is primarily managed by nature: certainly not by man’s technologies. None of our agricultural strategies – so-called organic farming included – do anything more constructive in this area than tune already-existing natural processes. But more generally, all our activity that focuses on maximizing human-preferred resource availability is proving increasingly disruptive to the overall renewal processes within nature, and thereby progressively diminishing total lifeform resource availability. From this perspective, all rhetoric such as good for business or bad for industry is therefore foolish if not uttered within a wider debate recognizing how human life itself evolved long before business or modern industry were even thought about. Neither business nor industry are essential to human life, whereas non-human lifeforms are utterly indispensable.
For as long as such perspectives remain culturally suppressed such that minds generally ignore them, key truths regarding the challenges faced by human development will also remain suppressed. The business or industry spokesperson typically plays up one set of values and ignores others in the knowledge that many minds will fail to join the dots in such matters. Threats of unemployment, loss of wealth, or economic collapse serve to intimidate compromised minds into accepting human activities otherwise seen as direct threats to the entire species – whether through ecological destruction or even as vectors of war. The deceptive social cultures mankind has evolved easily exploit natural self-preservation instincts to leave most minds narrowly fixated on their own immediate needs. Truly global issues ultimately impacting all of us thus come to be seen as someone else’s problem: a position which in terms of them being properly addressed effectively neglects them as nobody’s problem at all.
How this ominous lack of collective responsibility comes to be scarcely acknowledged anywhere within mainstream culture demands another tale of reality. But once again the all-important backdrop is the manipulation of mind via the presentation of certain perspectives and narrative alongside the negation of others.
The promotion of determinism implicit in the modern scientific and objective view can be seen politically as just an extension of previous religious doctrines, in that all such worldviews undermine the individual’s sense of autonomy by convincing him he is basically at the mercy of forces beyond his control. Invoking powerful external and limiting realities that curtail the scope of individual action has obvious political benefits for all who seek to exploit others. And although as individuals we obviously are indeed subject to limitations the universe imposes on us, there is no justifiable need to emphasize any such truly intractable realities as they simply cannot be transgressed by any means at all. Hence, the very fact that other limitations have to be preached marks them off as nothing more than inventions of human minds, rather than true limitations of the human condition.
By examining how such artificial limitations and constraints are stressed within specific cultures as religious commandments or civil laws, authority can be seen seeking to restrict behavior of which people are in fact perfectly capable. Hence, the degree to which any given doctrine might succeed in convincing an individual he cannot do what is in fact perfectly doable is a measure of how easily he succumbs to such outside pressure and intimidation – even if, for obvious reasons, all this is poorly acknowledged by all concerned. The common use of legal sanctions to enforce such behavioral constraints only further emphasizes them to be nothing more than human efforts to curtail the freedom of others by intimidation. It is one thing to deliberately refrain from acting in certain manners, but only through indoctrination does the mind fool itself into a belief that it cannot do what it actually can – even if such foolishness proves more self-flattering than an admission one is in fact socially intimidated.
Control of human behavior in the religious domain is similarly easy to see in terms of behavioral prohibitions – complete with sanctions that might be exacted in the hereafter, or even in this life by some blade-swinging keeper of the faith. Either way, fear is deployed as a weapon to subdue the spirit and gain social power through coercion – ironically in the name of spiritual pursuits that often postulate ultimate power as essentially outside the human realm.
The same basic ruse is even more subtle and effective in the case of the modern secular objective outlook – the deployment of fear being both more diffuse and more subliminal. The world is presented as a set of immutable realities but – somewhat different from the situation with civil law and religion – it is a world actually devoid of untoward consequences for trying to break the constraints of those realities, given they are in fact unbreakable laws of nature. However, the political trick lies in extensively stretching this principle of immutable and deterministic laws to cover all cultural areas – simultaneously negating by omission any meaningful ideas of subjective understanding or real personal agency. Consequently, the objective perspective, together with its monolithic model of factual knowledge and causal inevitability, enjoys almost total dominion over all key areas of authority and cultural dialog – the individual being effectively discredited as soon as any thoughts he entertains or ideas he voices are deemed not objectively true.