Included contributors to this psychosis-inducing ‘Invented Reality’ are the Western systems of government, commerce, justice, education, medicine, and science (pre-modern physics) which, together, form a mutually supportive ‘house of cards’.

 

It has been said, for example by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, that the ‘big lie’ can be so big that the ordinary person lacks the audacity to ‘call it out’.   The phenomenon has also been found, in nonlinear dynamics, where patterns of activity, once established, ‘dig themselves in’ so that they are ‘locked in’ by ‘high switching costs.   Furthermore, in the Systems Sciences, investigators such as Martine Dodds-Taljaard, and György Jaros, co-authors of The Name of the Devil is Suboptimization’, draw our attention to this same ‘big lie’ phenomenon permeating Western socio‐economic, political, educational and managerial practices, in general.

 

The suggestion is that something went awry with Western society thinking, ‘bigtime’, roughly 300 years ago, in the form of an invasive new mindset’ which was termed, in the systems sciences ‘suboptimization’ which refers to the arbitrary declaring of ‘independence’ of a system simply by ‘naming it’ and dividing it into ‘components’ by ‘naming’ the components, and thus psychologically reducing purely relational dynamics to terms of named ‘things-in-themselves’ notionally with their own powers of sourcing actions and developments.  Once this language-based psychological deconstruction of purely relational phenomena has been accomplished, the ‘split out pseudo-pieces’ are re-assembled with language and grammar and reconstituted as an ‘independent system’, notionally with its own powers of sourcing actions and developments.  This humongous lie has become a foundational truth in Western Invented Reaity.

 

The Name of the Devil is Suboptimization’

“The above aphorism, attributed to Kenneth Boulding, points to the inherent weakness characterizing the mindset and socio‐economic, political, educational and managerial practices of Western Industrial society as it developed over the past 300 years. It has its basis in the analytic‐reductionistic scientific paradigm, which, despite the remarkable technological applications it spawned, is inappropriate, conflict‐generating and dysfunctional in a world characterized by global interconnectedness and mutual interdependence …” — György Jaros and Martine Dodds-Taljaard

 

The ’big lie’ is the cultivating of belief in an ‘Invented Reality’ created by ‘naming’ relational forms within the transforming relational continuum, to impute ‘thing-in-itself being’ to them, and then employing grammar to psychologically endow them with ‘their own powers of sourcing actions and developments.

 

This Invented Reality’ is the ‘big lie’.  It is nothing like the reality of our actual experience of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum.  This Western ‘Invented Reality’ has NOT been ‘bought into’ by indigenous aboriginals, Taoists, adherents of Advaita Vedanta, and Western culture sceptics among whom I count myself.

The reader who is a Western culture adherent may tend to summarily dismiss the ‘big lie’ assertion that Western society is living in an ‘Invented Reality’, although that is the view of many investigators and not just Martine Dodds-Taljaard, and György Jaros,.  What may ‘hold one back’ from accepting that Western society is under the influence of ‘the big lie’ is the impression of the amazing progress and achievements of Western culture as it is.  However, this ‘impression’ of ‘achievement’ is part of ‘the big lie’ since what makes life better for ‘humans’ seen as ‘independent beings’ may be infusing dissonance into the transforming relational continuum which is the ‘real reality’.   In other words, the language-based portrayal of reality in terms of individual people, nations, organizations notionally endowed with powers of sourcing actions and developments ‘eclipses’ (in the psyche) the relational reality of our actual experience of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum.

 

That is what is ‘at issue’ in ‘suboptimization’ since, if the optimized sub-system is not really ‘independent’ then ‘improving it’ as if it were an independent system-in-itself is necessarily messing up the ‘larger reality’; i.e. the suprasystem (relational continuum) it is included in; i.e. the ‘greater reality’ which is ‘being inadvertently messed with’ as one is optimizing the imagined-as-‘independent subsystem’.

 

The ‘big lie’ is thus ‘suboptimization’ of a notional ‘independently-existing system-in-itself’ such as ‘a human’, ‘a nation’, ‘a corporation’, … which, in reality, are relational forms in a transforming relational continuum, that we have affixed ‘name-labels’ to.

 

The assigning of a name to a relational form in the flow-continuum is preparatory to the psychological abstraction-based representations of language and grammar where the name-instantiated notional thing-in-itself is notionally equipped with the powers of sourcing actions and developments. This is the ‘double error’ spoken of by Nietzsche wherein we start with relational appearance (a flashing in the relational atmospheric dynamic) and split it into two parts; i.e. a thing-in-itself with the powers of sourcing actions and developments; i.e. ‘lightning flashes’, a psychological ‘double-error’ (Nietzsche), the first error being the imputing of thing-in-itself being to a relational form in the flow and the second error being to impute powers of sourcing action and development to the relational form-come-thing-in-itself..

 

While no-one would dispute the simplified communications utility of this ‘double error’ ploy, one would not want to confuse this trickery designed to facilitate the linguistic articulating of a reality constituted by relational forms in a transforming relational continuum, for ‘reality’.  As Wittgenstein emphasizes, we may use such abstract devices to conjure up purely relational understandings, but without latching on to the abstract device itself (without ‘letting the tool run away with the workman’, the human with the divine’ – Emerson).  That is, in Wittgenstein’s words in his final two propositions in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus;

 

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

7.0 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

 

Languages that work by developing word-pictures of the dynamics of things-in-themselves that lie out there in front of us are not capable of directly capturing the transforming relational dynamic we share inclusion in.  Indirect capture is demanded as in modern physics rendering of reality, which has been described as the; ‘Surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’.  Nietzsche propounds on the impossibility of DIRECTLY AND EXPLICITLY visually capturing and articulating a relational reality by means of ‘voyeur’ (outsider) perspectives (where we are not ‘included’ in the reality, but are ‘looking at it as outsiders’; i.e. the challenge then becomes one of bringing many different perspectives into connective confluence in an ‘omniperspectival’ or ‘holographic’ understanding (‘view’ is too small a word) of the reality in which we are included.  Individual perspectives are innately ‘incomplete’.

 

There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’.– Nietzsche

 

The ’big lie’ of modern Western culture culminates in the ‘Invented Reality’ that we use language and grammar to construct from perspectival seeing on the basis of the psychological power of ‘naming’ to impute ‘persisting independent being’ to relational flow-forms and using grammar to notionally equip the name-reified forms with the powers of sourcing actions and developments. 

 

But what anchors and holds ‘the big lie’ in place?  The answer is; ‘ego’.  ‘Ego’ is the language and grammar instantiated depiction of ‘self’ as a ‘thing-in-itself’ (thanks to ‘naming’) with the power of sourcing actions and developments (thanks to grammar).

 

Ego arises not only in the case of the Western ‘human’ but also in the case of the Western ‘nation’ and the Western ‘corporation’, all of which are given imputed ‘thing-in-itself existence’ by ‘naming’ which serves as a psychological ‘stub’ of ‘being’ that can then be (notionally) equipped with the powers of sourcing actions and developments.

 

The ‘ghost in the machine’ of ‘the big lie’ that serves up ‘Invented Reality’ is thus ‘ego’, the belief in oneself as a name-instantiated ‘independent being’ with powers of locally sourcing actions and developments.  Ego is the ‘ghost-in-the-machine’ archetype, the spirit of ‘sorcery’.

 

* ** * * now to add comments on the complications that ensue in our thinking and understanding

 

CLOSING THE LOOP ON THE INITIAL PROPOSITION;

 

The initial proposition (restated for reading convenience) was so comprehensive (i.e. implying that Western culture understanding of ‘reality’ was a huge lie) that it tends to induce a psychological knee-jerk rejection that ‘this can’t be true’.  Thus, the reader may have summarily dismissed it rather than holding on to it for further consideration. Here it is once again, played from the ‘top’;

 

The psychosis-inducing Invented Reality of Western Society

Included contributors to this psychosis-inducing ‘Invented Reality’ are the Western systems of government, commerce, justice, education, medicine, and science (pre-modern physics) which, together, form a mutually supportive ‘house of cards’.

It has been said, for example by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, that the ‘big lie’ can be so big that the ordinary person lacks the audacity to ‘call it out’.

How can this be?   This question only arises if one first gets by the impulse of rejecting this proposition ‘out of hand’.  Such knee-jerk rejection is exactly what enables the ‘big lie’; i.e. it undermines too many things we ‘know’ to be true, reliable and well-founded (or so we have been ‘brought up’ to believe).

 

Of course, in a psychological house of cards situation, a multiplicity of falsehoods can be arranged so as to support a purported ‘truth’.  In the case of Western culture, all of the following ‘foundational elements’ in our Western society, which we are brought up to believe in and trust, including ‘government, commerce, justice, education, medicine and science’ co-contribute to our impression of ‘the way our world works’ (aka ‘reality’).

 

However, all of these are ‘cards’ that are supporting a ‘house of cards reality’ based on the concept of ‘things-in-themselves’ with the powers of sourcing actions and developments.   This concept; —‘things-in-themselves’ with the powers of sourcing actions and developments’ — is not only abstraction, it is the ‘double error’ spoken of by Nietzsche, Poincaré and other philosophers where we observe a relational ‘appearance’ such as electrical flow in the relationally transforming field and use language (1) to impute being to this relational ‘appearance’ by naming it ‘lightning’ and (2 ) to impute the powers of local sourcing of action and developments to the ‘thing-in-itself’ we have just ‘created’ (as an abstract thing-in-itself in our minds) by ‘naming’.

 

With this ‘double error’, we have created an Invented Reality’ wherein dynamics, as we use language to share our impressions of dynamics, are in terms of name-instantiated ‘things-in-themselves’, notionally with the powers of sourcing actions and developments.

 

What is it that makes these language and grammar-based (double-error based) abstractions seem real?

 

What makes it ‘seem real’ is the ‘house of cards’ pseudo-reality that we build with these language and grammar-based (double-error based) abstractions.

 

In the reality of our relational experience, everything is in flux (Heraclitus, modern physics), but in Western culture ‘Invented Reality’ (reality as reported on rather than as experienced), reality is reduced to terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ with the powers of sourcing actions and developments.  The relational form in the transforming relational continuum that we label a ‘human’ is intellectually transformed by employing the ‘double error’ of ‘naming’ the form to impute persisting thing-in-itself being’, and using grammar to endow it with the notional powers of sourcing actions and developments.  This ‘double error’ that reduces relational reality to a synthetic reality constituted by things-in-themselves’ notionally with the powers of sourcing actions and developments, is the underpinning of Western culture ‘Invented Reality’;  ‘government, commerce, justice, education, medicine and science’,  ALL OF WHICH WE ‘INCARNATE’, USING LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR (I.E. IN OUR INTELLECT/PSYCHE), IN TERMS OF ‘INDEPENDENT THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES’ WITH THE POWERS OF LOCALLY SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS.

 

Together, these ’double error based’ components [‘government, commerce, justice, education, medicine and science’] form a ‘house of cards’ pseudo-reality; i.e. the ‘Invented Reality’ of Western culture.  They are all ‘perspective’ based (an innately incomplete basis for understanding reality) and perspectives, when articulated, require ‘their own specialized language’ where everything is ‘split into pieces’, so that it remains for the ‘listener’ to re-integrate the multiple ‘perspectives’ of reality, into a relationally-coherent continuum (i.e. to recover an understanding of the transforming relational continuum which Western language and grammar decomposes into multiple ‘independent perspectives’, each one presented as ‘the truth’.  The innate ‘incompleteness’ of individual perspectives, in a Western culture that believes in ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help me God’ of individual perspectives, coupled with the Western culture belief in in the ‘truth’ of individual perspectives, gives rise to the mocking of this Western culture belief by Lafonataine; “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure” (‘The truth (reasoning) of the most powerful is always the best”).  One might argue the simple ‘truthful reporting’ is NOT prone to biased reasoning, but as Nietzsche observes, ‘truth’ is “the obligation to lie according to fixed convention”.

“We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors – in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all…”  –Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.

Since Western language and grammar reduces relational transformation, by way of the language and grammar based ‘double error’ (e.g. inventing the reality of ‘things-in-themselves’ with the powers of ‘sourcing actions and developments), and since ‘perspective’ is subjective and innately limited, it is no surprise that the concept of ‘truth’, as it pertains to individuals reporting on their perspective-limited visual observations, should be called into question.  The recognized need for omni-perspectival understanding in indigenous aboriginal cultures as in modern physics has already been discussed, as has the innate and misleading incompleteness of the individual perspective.  The conclusion being (as reached in indigenous aboriginal societies, Buddhism and modern physics) that understanding the relational reality we are included in requires an omniperspectival or ‘holographic’ understanding.

Western culture, instead of pursuing the path of co-cultivating the omni-perspectival or holographic understanding of reality, as pursued by indigenous aboriginal cultures, Buddhists, modern physics (The surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions), has chosen instead, to first ‘reduce reality’ to an ‘Invented Reality’ based on ‘beings’ with powers of sourcing actions and developments.  Note that this ‘reduction’ is language and grammar based and it ‘comes first’.  The second step is to intellectually ‘rebuild reality’ by bringing together multiple perspectives based on ‘reducing’ relational forms to ‘beings’ (things-in-themselves) notionally with their own powers of sourcing actions and developments. ‘Reality’ is ‘Invented’ as a house of cards built from name-instantiated ‘things-in-themselves’ with powers of actions and development.  Instead of the world as a transforming relational continuum, we have name-instantiated ‘continents’ that we say ‘drift’ (we use grammar to endow them with their own powers of sourcing actions and development) so that the natural primacy of relational transformation is obscured or ‘occluded’ in the intellectualizing mind, by language and grammar based imagery of dirifting and colliding continents.  The understanding of a relationally transforming continuum, is ‘occluded’ by such intellectual contrivance.

The logical constraints imposed on the language and grammar based intellectual breakdown of the world into name-instantiated terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ with the power of sourcing actions and developments, is the ‘house of cards’ constraint; i.e. the Invented Realities’ of the full suite of Western reductionist sciences must ‘more or less’ ‘fit together as in a house of cards.   It is their ‘fitting together’ that gives the sense of the ‘truth’ of the integrated whole.  As in the duplicitous ‘nature’ – ‘nurture’ ‘sourcing dichotomy, there is the dichotomy of ‘continental drift’ and ‘sea-floor expansion’ as the source of terrestrial/oceanic morphology, they are both based on the abstract concept of ‘sorcery’; i.e. the earth as having the notional power of sourcing actions and developments as is easily put infused into the psyche with language and grammar.

Western culture ‘reality’ is a language and grammar ‘Invented Reality’, a ‘house of cards’ reality based on ‘independent things-in-themselves with the power of sourcing actions and developments.

The invisible ‘imaginary archetype’ that serves the psyche as the wellspring of this ‘house of cards’ pseudo-reality is this sense of ‘sourcing power’ which plays the foundational role in our Western culture ‘Invented Realty’.  This disembodied sourcing power is always there, implicit, in our Western language-based discussions (constructions) of ‘reality’.   It is otherwise known a ‘ego’.   Without ‘ego’, Western culture ‘Invented Reality’ would not ‘work’.

 

Ego is the ‘holy ghost’, an imaginary ‘archetype’ that lies beneath the cover of naming-instantiated abstraction of ‘thing-in-itself being’ to furnish the ‘thing-in-itself being’ with its notional powers of locally sourcing actions and developments.

 

This entire house of cards ego-based Western ‘Invented Reality’ is ‘locked in’ by ‘high switching costs’ since it has continually bestowed rewards, recognition and elevated influence over change in socially conforming understanding, to ‘high producers’ (high sorcerers), anchoring (locking in) the belief in ‘being-based powers of sorcery’.   This lock-in based on presumed powers of sorcery is deeply and firmly infused into ‘government, commerce, justice, education, medicine and science’.

 

Is this all a ‘big lie’ that it is impossible (for a Western culture adherent) to swallow?  How do we get around the fact that Western culture has been the most ‘successful’ culture on the planet to date?  Western humans are enjoying comfortable, technology uplifted lives, that leave other human cultures such as aboriginals behind in the dust of their rapid science and technology-based advancements.

 

But then again, such differential ‘progress’ would only ‘make sense’ if each ‘named’ variety of animal or human signified ‘thing-in-itself’ existence, each named species existing separately from the rest.  If such name-instantiated ‘independent existence’ is purely psychological abstraction, then any/all attempts to improve the condition of humans relative to one another or relative to other species would be language and grammar induced psychological aberration.  That is;

 

The Name of the Devil is Suboptimization’

“The above aphorism, attributed to Kenneth Boulding, points to the inherent weakness characterizing the mindset and socio‐economic, political, educational and managerial practices of Western Industrial society as it developed over the past 300 years. It has its basis in the analytic‐reductionistic scientific paradigm, which, despite the remarkable technological applications it spawned, is inappropriate, conflict‐generating and dysfunctional in a world characterized by global interconnectedness and mutual interdependence …” — György Jaros and Martine Dodds-Taljaard

 

The point is that while Western language allows us to use ‘naming’ to split out relational forms in the transforming relational continuum as notional ‘things-in-themselves’ and likewise to use grammar to notionally equip the ‘named things-in-themselves’ with powers of locally sourcing actions and developments, the ‘Invented Reality’ we construct on the basis of this ‘double error’ is a far cry from the relational reality of our actual experience, which is characterized in modern physics by nonlocal, atemporal, thingless holodynamics that recalls who a relational form might experience inclusion in a transforming relational continuum; i.e. ‘experience’ as contrasted with attempts to ‘articulate’ such experience.

 

Suboptimization’ follows from the first error of ‘naming’ relational forms in the flow, thus imputing to them ‘persisting being’ whereupon the second error of ‘grammar’ can embellish the first error with the second error of imputing powers of sourcing actions and developments to the artifact hatched by the first error.

 

The ‘anatomy’ of the ‘big lie’ thus comes in the form of ‘house of cards’ (a mutually supporting, but hollow Invented Reality psycho-structure) inhabited by an invisible ‘sourcing force’ that we can identify as Western culture supported ‘human ego’.

 

Last-but-not-least in this brief write-up, is the point that Western culture, by its support of this abstract ‘Invented Reailty’ is cultivating a psychosis-inducing’ social environment.  While all Western culture adherents are impacted, the sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’ are most troubled by the Western culture’ language grammar invoked ‘Divided Self’ which psychologically ‘rips us out’ of the relational continuum in which we are relational forms, and culturally imposes on us ‘thing-in-itself’ identity notionally with powers of sourcing actions and developments, … ‘equipment’ that we are supposed to be using for the benefit of ourselves, our family, our community and the world.

 

This is a complete, psychosis-inducing ‘big lie’, that Western culture adherents impose on one another, not only through family and other social relations, but through ‘central governments’ and a ‘producer-product’ ‘economy’ concept, all of which incorporates the ‘double error’ of belief in ‘beings’ with the power of sourcing actions and developments.

 

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AFTER-WORD

 

The sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’ who are confused and distressed by the psychosis inducing Western culture, if they let their confusion overtly/publicly manifest, are likely to be treated with ‘lobotomizing’ drugs in an attempt to restore as their base-case thinking, the Western culture ego sense of self, a belief in themselves as ‘things-in-themselves’ or ‘beings’ with the powers of sourcing actions and developments’.  These sensitive ones, who understand themselves as relational forms in the transforming relational continuum; i.e. where ‘their art’ is the channeling of relational influence from their unique situational inclusion in the transforming relational continuum, rather than, as they are seen in Western culture terms;’humans’ as ‘independent beings’ with ego-driven powers of ‘sorcery’.  Such ‘miner’s canaries’ will have to ‘switch cultures’ in order to escape from repetitive attempts by their Western culture families, friends and medicine men (psychiatrists etc.) to restore them to aberrant Western ‘normality’, a language and grammar based ‘normality’ wherein a human understands herself as an independent being with her own internal (ego-based) powers of sorcery.

* * *