Do you ever get the feeling that something is not right with the world? That somehow we are all caught up in some universal joke for the benefit of persons unseen and unknown?
How about the idea of an artificial framework imposed on our existence - imposed, moreover, not by any god or gods, but very ordinary human beings with a knack for controlling people and a sense of how to influence our society? These people are the cream of the crop when it comes to manipulating our impulses.
These rules form a matrix within which our world operated. It is resilient, having survived successive ages as the rise of one civilisation crowds out the decline and fall of another. Whatever external factors may occur, the matrix remains in place because it depends on three basic, innate and unchanging human traits.
The first is a primal need for authority. Though every human being is born with an innate capacity to think, thinking for ourselves is something we only do as an absolute last resort. Most of the decisions that we make day to day are nothing more than automatic responses. This relates to our morning bathroom routine, our selection of routes to take to work, the choices we make during the workday. It even relates to the way we interact with those around us.
Our lives take the form of a series of trance-states which occur in succession, one after another. How re respond to a new influenced is determined by our genetic programming and our societal conditioning. Only when we encounter a change in our surroundings - something unknown or unfamiliar - do we resort to independent thought. It is by understanding this reticence to engage our minds that the Players have been able to trap us exactly where they want us in their great Game.
In short they fill a vacuum - doing our thinking for us. Naturally they must conceal what they are doing, or we would resist the idea of someone else controlling our minds. The deception they use to circumvent this problem involves an elaborate version of reality constructed from a series of inter-connected myths. These myths form the constituent part of an overarching meta-myth: the Linearity myth. This prepares our minds to accept the many minor myths propounded by the Players. So intricate is this system, and so well-concealed, that we simply accept it as the norm.
If we are to understand this artificial reality we must accept that it is impressively intricate. So closely are the myths connected that it is almost impossible to isolate and discredit a single one without dealing with all the others at the same time.
On the individual level, there is the narcissistic trance. The underlying presumption of this trance is that we experience ourselves as being the nexus of the universe. Instead of seeing ourselves as part of a whole, we experience the whole as an extension of ourselves. Only pure narcissists, such as the players, experience the world literally in this way. For the rest of us, who are merely narcissistic, it represents a bias, which is in the background of our thoughts all the time. This bias is subtle, but nevertheless, extremely potent.
Narcissism has become the defining feature of the world a we know it over the last several decades. It is the sine qua non of man in the twentieth and twenty first centuries, defining how we see ourselves and each other. So great is the grip which narcissism now holds over society that most of us don't even think about it as we conduct our day to day lives - it is simply there, in the background, controlling everything.
Moreover we have now reached the stage where narcissism itself is no longer seen as reprehensible, but as something to aspire it. It is the idol of the Players, and therefore serves as our idol too. We have become a community of idle idolaters, each aspiring to embody that "enlightened selfishness" which was the philosophy Adam Smith expounded as the justification for an acquisitive outlook in which greed has come to dominate over need.
Besides our individual tendency towards narcissism, we are also inclined towards tribal behaviour. How ever individual we may be, all human beings are essentially reliant on each other for social contact, and will naturally tend to gravitate towards one another. The groups to which we belong will exert considerable influence on how we think and on how we live our lives. If we are not careful we will be homogenized - trained to think and act like those around us.
Finally there comes the societal trance, comprising a series of myths such as the myth of scarcity and the myth of law and order. While any one of these myths could be challenged - even exposed as fraudulent - in isolation, taken together they are seemingly inviolable.
The Myth of Linearity, which claims that sequential logic is the ultimate authority in world affairs, predominates over all these other myths. This is the basis for the web of myths which stifles our society, and it argues that everything can be accounted for by an endless cycle of cause and effect.
It is time to bring about the end to this trance and reject the myths surrounding us. We cannot know what society will look like when freed from these myths, but I for one would like to find out. - 30535
How about the idea of an artificial framework imposed on our existence - imposed, moreover, not by any god or gods, but very ordinary human beings with a knack for controlling people and a sense of how to influence our society? These people are the cream of the crop when it comes to manipulating our impulses.
These rules form a matrix within which our world operated. It is resilient, having survived successive ages as the rise of one civilisation crowds out the decline and fall of another. Whatever external factors may occur, the matrix remains in place because it depends on three basic, innate and unchanging human traits.
The first is a primal need for authority. Though every human being is born with an innate capacity to think, thinking for ourselves is something we only do as an absolute last resort. Most of the decisions that we make day to day are nothing more than automatic responses. This relates to our morning bathroom routine, our selection of routes to take to work, the choices we make during the workday. It even relates to the way we interact with those around us.
Our lives take the form of a series of trance-states which occur in succession, one after another. How re respond to a new influenced is determined by our genetic programming and our societal conditioning. Only when we encounter a change in our surroundings - something unknown or unfamiliar - do we resort to independent thought. It is by understanding this reticence to engage our minds that the Players have been able to trap us exactly where they want us in their great Game.
In short they fill a vacuum - doing our thinking for us. Naturally they must conceal what they are doing, or we would resist the idea of someone else controlling our minds. The deception they use to circumvent this problem involves an elaborate version of reality constructed from a series of inter-connected myths. These myths form the constituent part of an overarching meta-myth: the Linearity myth. This prepares our minds to accept the many minor myths propounded by the Players. So intricate is this system, and so well-concealed, that we simply accept it as the norm.
If we are to understand this artificial reality we must accept that it is impressively intricate. So closely are the myths connected that it is almost impossible to isolate and discredit a single one without dealing with all the others at the same time.
On the individual level, there is the narcissistic trance. The underlying presumption of this trance is that we experience ourselves as being the nexus of the universe. Instead of seeing ourselves as part of a whole, we experience the whole as an extension of ourselves. Only pure narcissists, such as the players, experience the world literally in this way. For the rest of us, who are merely narcissistic, it represents a bias, which is in the background of our thoughts all the time. This bias is subtle, but nevertheless, extremely potent.
Narcissism has become the defining feature of the world a we know it over the last several decades. It is the sine qua non of man in the twentieth and twenty first centuries, defining how we see ourselves and each other. So great is the grip which narcissism now holds over society that most of us don't even think about it as we conduct our day to day lives - it is simply there, in the background, controlling everything.
Moreover we have now reached the stage where narcissism itself is no longer seen as reprehensible, but as something to aspire it. It is the idol of the Players, and therefore serves as our idol too. We have become a community of idle idolaters, each aspiring to embody that "enlightened selfishness" which was the philosophy Adam Smith expounded as the justification for an acquisitive outlook in which greed has come to dominate over need.
Besides our individual tendency towards narcissism, we are also inclined towards tribal behaviour. How ever individual we may be, all human beings are essentially reliant on each other for social contact, and will naturally tend to gravitate towards one another. The groups to which we belong will exert considerable influence on how we think and on how we live our lives. If we are not careful we will be homogenized - trained to think and act like those around us.
Finally there comes the societal trance, comprising a series of myths such as the myth of scarcity and the myth of law and order. While any one of these myths could be challenged - even exposed as fraudulent - in isolation, taken together they are seemingly inviolable.
The Myth of Linearity, which claims that sequential logic is the ultimate authority in world affairs, predominates over all these other myths. This is the basis for the web of myths which stifles our society, and it argues that everything can be accounted for by an endless cycle of cause and effect.
It is time to bring about the end to this trance and reject the myths surrounding us. We cannot know what society will look like when freed from these myths, but I for one would like to find out. - 30535
About the Author:
John Berling Hardy helps people out manoeuvre the manipulators in their lives. For more of his writings please visit www.playingtheplayers.com
