There’s No Mental Health In Winning
Under its glossy camouflage, society is a big, ugly machine. It’s ugly because it has nothing to do with our well-being or happiness, despite all its claims to the contrary. The point of the social system is not to increase human well-being or happiness, but to incentivize us to keep on walking the treadmill, to keep us engaged in doing all these meaningless things that take up all our time. We’re bamboozled with trivial nonsense from morning to night and the way the system works is that we’re never given a chance to crawl out from under it. We’re kept busy trying to please it, which we never can. In our innocence and naivete we might imagine that we are doing our bit for the greater good but — really — the only good where serving is the good of the system, the good of the machine. We’re obeying a god that doesn’t care about us…
The well-being of the machine has nothing to do with our well-being — the two things are mutually incompatible! The machine cares about itself, not us. It has to keep us alive and reasonably healthy if we are to be useful to it, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean that it exists to serve or support us. It’s completely the other way around — we exist for its benefit, not vice versa. This is — generally speaking — something that’s very hard for us to spot — it’s hard for us to spot because we’re identified with the machine (which is to say, we can’t tell the difference between us and it, between who we are and the social group or collective that we are a part of).
This — we might say — has to do with our relationship with power. When we come up against power we can do one of two things — either we can fight against it (so that if we prevail over it we can become the new power) or we can obey it so completely that we become it. In the first case we acquiesce to the power and allow it to define us, which means that we are that power and so in this way the status code is preserved. This isn’t just a version of Stockholm syndrome (where we involuntarily empathise with our captors and experience loyalty towards them) — it goes much further than this. By allowing the arbitrary authority structure to say who we are we lose who we really are. The system negates us by defining us, in other words. If — on the other hand — we vanquish the old power then we become the power instead and so nothing changes this way either. We can say therefore that because society is based on authority, based on power, this inevitably means that it is detrimental to our mental health.
Because society is so pervasive, because it surrounds us on side, because it is so much weightier than us, this means that there’s no chance of us successfully fighting against it. Almost inevitably therefore we align ourselves with the authority and let it tell us who we are and what we are supposed to be doing in life. If we make a show of not letting us define it define us then it’ll do so anyway, it’ll simply define us as being a deviant, as being a misfit, as being a ‘non-person’. Rebelling plays right into the adversary’s hands, therefore — to fight against the system is to be infected by its derangement, as Philip K Dick says. ‘Allowing society to define us’ and ‘defining ourselves in opposition to it’ both come down to the very same thing — we lose all individuality, we lose our connection to what’s actually real, we get subsumed within the never-ending game. We can’t reclaim our individuality either by saying ‘yes’ to the collective or by saying ‘no’ to it — the attempt to exit the game is a legitimate move in the game.
Mental health — we may say — is that state of being in which we are not being defined by the generic authority structure, the state of being in which we’re not playing the ubiquitous game that everyone has to play. This is just another way of saying that mental health has to do with our intrinsic freedom, and the thing about this is that authority — obviously enough — is the sworn enemy of freedom! Authority works by denying freedom — that is precisely how it gets to be authority. What this means therefore is that authority very effectively erases or annihilates our individuality — as soon as we fall within its sphere of influence we lose who we are and become instead a generic unit, a nominal individual who is in reality nothing more than an extension of that authority, that organising rule. When I identify with the local source of authority then I am only able to see myself in the terms that it has given me and what this means is that I am it. I have been ‘engulfed’ by it, subsumed within it. It has made a copy of me and I think that this copy is the real thing, or — to put this another way — we’re living as a simulation of ourselves.
In the identified (or heteronomous) state I have zero autonomy and therefore no mental health, no mental well-being. What I have instead is false autonomy, false freedom (which is that situation where I mistakenly believe the terms within which I understand the world and myself to be ‘objectively true’, when this is not at all the case). When I choose between the different possibilities that have been provided for me then I experience this as autonomy, as agency, whilst really all that’ happening is that I’m being manoeuvred every step of the way. What we’re looking at here is a classic example of The Salesman Trick, as ably explained here by psychotherapist Douglas Flemons (1991) –
As any good hypnotist, magician, or comedian knows, the offer or availability of freely choosing between alternatives at a given contextual level brings the particularities of choice into the foreground of conscious awareness. This necessarily relegates to the background (i.e. out of awareness and out of the realm of conscious choice) the higher-level context or premise determining the range and meaning of the offered alternatives. The presence of choice (between particularities) at one level masks — and in some sense precludes — choice (between premises) at a more encompassing level.
The way not to be caught out by the trick is to not struggle or fight but to cultivate equanimity with regard to all the options that it provides us with. ‘Equanimity’ means lack of attachment, no like and no dislike. It means we are ‘observing without the distorting effect of prejudice’. What we’re essentially doing here is that we are ‘cultivating equanimity with regard to winning and losing’ (since this is what all games, all artificial worlds come down to). For us, as adapted members of society, we simply can’t comprehend why anyone in their right minds wouldn’t strive to win — for us, winning is the equivalent of achieving individuality. ‘Success in the game’ has been substituted for by ‘being who we really are’. We see being winning as resolving everything, we see it as ‘achieving everything we could ever possibly want to achieve’. Winning is a substitute for genuine mental health or well-being, in other words, and in the game that we’re playing it is treated as such, valued as such. In reality however there is no mental health in winning. Winning is the absence of autonomy — to be a winner is to be 100% heteronomous. It’s a state of dependency rather than autonomy because we’re dependent upon the system in order for there to be such a thing as ‘winning’, in order for ‘being a winner’ to be recognised as a thing and so this state of ‘being 100% dependent on a made up or invented system’ can hardly be seen as having anything to do with mental health!
We don’t usually see ourselves as going around ‘trying to win’ all the time — that would seem very crass. The ego never sees itself for what it is. Our implicit understanding is that mental health and social adaptation are one and the same thing, which is inevitably going to be the case since the only way we can understand anything is via the framework of interpretation that society has given us. We can’t escape the game, and we can’t see that the game is a game. We don’t have this awareness, and it is because we don’t have any insight into what’s going on that we are such hopeless prisoners. With no perspective, we cannot see our way out of the maze.
The idea that ‘mental health equals freedom from our total way of understanding the world’ is far too radical for us to be able to get our heads around it. There’s no way we’re going to see this. But no matter what we might understand to be the case there’s simply no way for us to find peace of mind or mental well-being within the terms that the game has provided for us — the problem isn’t that we haven’t adapted successfully enough to the authority structure (which we understand to be ‘reality’), the problem is that we have lost our connection to who we really are and there’s no way that society’s ‘experts’ are ever going to help us with this. As far as the socially adapted mind is concerned genuine autonomy or freedom simply isn’t ‘a thing’ and because it isn’t ‘a thing’ we don’t miss it. We’ve been given a substitute, which is false autonomy, false freedom. But whether we miss it or not our situation remains the same — we are the victims of a sinister trick, we are ‘fodder for the heartless machine’…
